Earthly Powers (40 page)

       "Heart," I said. "It happens very very occasionally. Five years I think it is since it last happened. I'm perfectly all right now."

       "Watch the drink. Cut down on the smoking." With his doctor's eyes he had noted my stained index finger. "Don't eat too much. First few months in the tropics and you eat like a horse, I know. Then follows anorexia. Hard to say which is worse. Where are you staying? How long are you staying?"

       "Rest house. How long I don't know. I've been writing. This is a good town for writing. Peaceful."

       "A drink, doc?" Fothergill offered.

       "A suku,. Plenty of water." A suku was a quarter of whisky as a stengah was a half. Doc Shawcross had a plain honest face with a high narrow forehead, his hair closecropped sunbleached wheat colour. The eyes were a speckled hazel. No sexual heat came out of him. A cool man, cool as his trade. About twenty-nine. "I'll have to give you a bit of a going-over, won't I? A bit rough, our rest house. I thought you might be staying with the DO." Meaning the District Officer, an unliterary man with, I was told, a secret sex life that precluded hospitality. Near the end of his tour, they said, and he wouldn't be coming back. "Or the Sultan, for that matter. Pearce could have fixed that." Pearce was a very old Australian who had married one of the Perak princesses and, a widower now, lived in a sort of gazebo in the grounds of the istana. "Anyway, why not move in with me? The doctor's house on Bukit Chandan," meaning Sandalwood Hill, "designed for a married doctor with a full quiver," ah, "but this doctor's by way of being a bachelor."

       "That's awfully kind."

       "That's a good idea, doc," Booth said. "He can take a trishaw down to the club. Arrange a two-buck weekly contract with one of those bastards. Same time every day." They liked me, I think, or they wanted me to put them in a book, even libelously, no matter, being put into a book was the important thing.

       "Come now if you like. My boy can fetch your barang from the rest house. Tea should just be about ready."

       "That's awfully kind."

       "A good idea, doc," Fothergill said, a scrawny bonykneed man with a paunch like a disease though it was only Anchor beer in the evening, Tiger beer in the morning.

       "That's really most awfully kind. But I have some packing to do. And must pay the bill."

       "Don't you bother about all that," Greene the planter said, a man with appropriately Iatexlike chins. "That can all be fixed up without any trouble. Those lazy sods at the rest house can do a bit of work for a change, and they won't pinch anything, more than their job's worth. So you go off with the doc and get a bit of a rest and perhaps we'll have a hand or two of something this evening." All these planters were in Kuala Kangsar for the day and most of the night, drove back to their estates near dawn, Rambutan and Pisang and Gutta Percha, all off the main Ipoh road.

       "This is really most terribly kind."

       So I was taken up Bukit Chandan by Doc Shawcross in his little Ford car. He had a bungalow newly painted green and white by the Public Works Department in a fenced garden cool with bougainvillaea, banyan, flame-of-the-forest and wild orchid. He had a great raintree, a papaya tree and two pomelos, as well as three flaring-red pepper bushes, and the gardener or orang kebun was at work with a hoe or chungkol while a copperhammer bird attended to its distant plumbing. Doc Shawcross parked the Ford in the porch, and we went onto the verandah toward the tinkle of teacups. No, one teacup and saucer, the standard blue of the British community. Yusof the kuki, a very muscular Malay with gentle manners, ran off with pleasure to get more crockery and make more sandwiches (corned beef pounded with paprika, paprika being a wonderful reviver in the late afternoon), and Doc Shawcross and I sat creaking on the rattan chairs. Purple clouds were being pulled with haste, like a blanket over pudic nudity, over the duckegg sky, and the view of golf course, mosque, istana and distant jungle was fine but glum. "At this time every day, prompt at teatime," he told me, "we get this douche." And gentle rain came down as gentle Yusof reappeared with sandwiches and Tiptree's cherry jam. "Terima kaseh, Yusof." Meaning thank you, meaning literally received with love. Then the rain eased and stopped and jungle smells sidled in to growl at the scent of grass refreshed, and the clouds were gone and the sky clear again.

       "This," I said, "is all one needs. I hope," I added, "you'll call me Kenneth or Ken."

       "Philip, me. When a new planet swims into his. I read a fair amount of poetry. The romantics, you know. I need a bit of beauty in this job. Ugliness, ah—perhaps you'll come round to the hospital tomorrow morning. Run a few 2 quick tests on you. Blood pressure, that sort of thing. Show you what I mean by ugliness, if you can take it. But you can, you're a writer, I've read your things, said that already, haven't I?" He poured me more tea. "You could write here, couldn't you? Very quiet." Very quiet indeed, for the birds of Malaya have no song. There are Christmas Day chirpings from tiny yellowbeaked sparrows, and the other calls are mere noises devised for the benefit of the Chinese, for the copperhammer bird reminds of the virtues of hard work, and the fever bird gives them something to gamble with, for one can never predict whether its descending chromatics will add up to three notes or to four. Thousands of dollars, I'd been told, laid on that. "Yusof," Philip said, "minta jalan sama Mat kebun ka-rest house dan bawa barang twin mi ka-sini." Meaning that Yusof and Mat the gardener were to go and fetch my stuff from the rest house. "You feel like a little lie-down? I have to go back to the hospital. I'll show you your room anyway."

       The room was at the back of the house with an uninterrupted view of the jungle. Simple PWD furniture, a bed with a rolled-up mosquito net, a ceiling fan, a bathroom leading off. "This is really most terribly." There was a plain deal desk and before it, ready, a Windsor chair. I foresaw Yusof padding in with ladyfingers or something in a jamjar.

       "I'll get Mas, she's the amah, to bring sheets. Nice name, don't you think, Mas, it means gold. I've been asked out to dinner tonight, I'll chuck if you like, we could spend a quiet evening at home." Home. I felt the promise of the prick of tears at the word, sentimental, noble, nostalgic, yearning, what the hell does it matter? "Or perhaps you'd like to come. He'd take it as an honour, two white men instead of one. A Tamil. Mahalingam is the name. That means great ah generative organ—"

       "Goes further, doesn't it, religious, holy symbol of life and so on. Well, yes, why not, thanks, I'm here to learn. Dinner with a Tamil. I thought the Tamils did the rough work out here."

       "Not all. I have one in the lab, a good lad, Madras degree. Mahalingam's new, in charge of the waterworks, sent from Penang, at the last club meeting we argued about inviting him to join, but it is a white man's club, except for the Malays of course, and the nature of a club is exclusivity. I mean, we're not allowed to join the Chinese Club or the Indian. Seems reasonable, really. Now I really must go and do my evening round."

       "Perhaps if I just sat on the verandah for a bit."

       "You do that. Awfully glad to have you, you know that."

       "Oh no, it's I who am awfully delighted, really."

       So I sat on the verandah and did nothing except gaze onto the golf course, which was full of natural hazards, and the bulbous mosque and the honeyColored istana as the sun made its cautious approach toward plunging plummetlike for the rush of stars and the stride of night, delightful, very much at peace.

       I heard the squeak of the wheels of two or three trishaws bringing my barang and the soft voices of Mat the gardener and Yusof the cook. Then Yusof came and said, "Saya buka barang, titan?" And he made the gesture of opening bags. Terimah kaseh, received with love and two dollar bills which Yusof tucked into the waist of his sarong.

       I showered and dressed in grey flannel trousers, white silk shirt and a gold and blue striped tie. The living room was long with a dining alcove, primrose cushions on the sturdy bamboo armchairs, ceiling fans spinning gently at their bottom notch, a bookcase with photographs on it. The women in his life: a plain sister and a handsome mother. His father evidently a doctor too, a smiling snap of him with black bag entering a car. The arms of the University of Manchester on a tobacco jar: Virgil's serpent arduus ad solem. A student group, Philip smiling uneasily in the back row, with a scowling professor impatient in the front middle. The books very ordinary, and I make no exception of the one or two of mine that were there, RLS, The Jungle Book, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, the Keats and Shelley in one volume a fourth-form prize, medical texts including Manson-Barr's Tropical Medicine. A decent ordinary colonial medical officer, hardworked but comfortable, not overpaid, one of the white leeches to be later vilified by the forces of disaffection, living in a standard pattern colonial bungalow which he called home.

       Yusof switched on the lights and drew the curtains of cream and leafgreen and said, "Titan mahu minum?" Yes, a drink would be welcome. He brought me a whisky and soda, cold but without ice. Received with love. "Titan datang," he said, hearing the Ford before I did. And then there was a weak brandy and ginger ale for Philip as we sat in the delightful languor of a tropical early evening.

       I said, "A lonely life would you consider it?"

       "Plenty of patients, not much time to feel lonely really, the local planters are decent enough chaps, the odd drink, the odd curry tiffin, the wives are mostly a great pain, was it Kipling who said the fall of the Empire would be due to the memsahibs?"

       "It sounds as though it might be somebody from the outside, an American perhaps. How long have you been here and why?"

       "Coming to the end of my first tour. Due for leave after Christmas. Why? Oh, I don't know really. The call of the East. Adventure." He said it with an ironic intonation. "I read a book by Conrad. Youth. It's there somewhere."

       "Conrad's dead, did you know that?"

       "I didn't, no, we get the news two months late. Dead, is he? I used to have this dream about being called in to save the life of a great man. I've only saved little men, and not too many of those. I take it you'll be writing about the East now. And then some medical student will read you and say ah adventure and go for an interview in Great Smith Street. A big responsibility."

       "So it's not like Conrad?"

       "Conrad left out the hookworm and the malaria and the yaws."

       "What are yaws?"

       "Yaws is not are. You'll see yaws tomorrow. We've got a yaws ward. Tropical paradise, that's a lot of nonsense. Bacilli and spirochetes like the hot damp. Vicious mosquitoes, snakebite. The Malays are mad, they won't report a snakebite, superstitious, then they die smiling, the bite's supposed to bring good luck. Straight to paradise, perhaps, sherbet and houris forever and ever. Then there's amok and latah and the Chinese have this peculiar disease they call shook jong, koro among the Buginese. Paradise indeed. And we can't do a thing for them, can't get into their minds. The Eastern mind, the West can't touch it, they say only Karl Marx can get into an Eastern mind because he's down to rockbottom, more rice and kill the bosses. I don't know, I know nothing about anything."

       "What are those things, mah jong and the other ones?"

       "Shook, not mah. The patient gets the idea that his penis is shrinking and retreating into his abdomen. He gets scared. He ties it to his leg with a bit of string or even tries to anchor it with a pin or a ii teng hok, that's a special double-bladed knife that jewellers use. Did you ever hear anything like it in your life? Then he dies of anxiety. You can't do a thing. It's all to do with sex, but it's no use bringing Freud into it. Amok means running amuck. It's nearly always Malays. They get a grievance and then they brood on it and are very sullen. They kill the man who causes the grievance and anybody else who happens to be around, many as possible. And then the amok johnny gets killed himself, if he's lucky. Latah—that's infinite suggestiveness. They'll imitate anything. There was one old lady in Taiping, heard a bicycle bell and started to imitate a cyclist pedalling and she just couldn't stop, died of exhaustion. Tell an orang latah that his mattress is his wife and he'll start trying to give it a baby. Conrad missed all that."

       "The three diseases of modern literature," I said. "D. H. Lawrence for that penis thing, latah is it for James Joyce, amuck for this young Hemingway character. Bang bang, punch punch, but it's really the death urge."

       "Don't know any of those chaps. You'll have to teach me what to read. Send for books from Singapore, that's what some of them do. Look, we'd better think about leaving. Quick shower, change." He was still in his working shorts. "You look very cool and smart, if I may so say. I like the tie. Shan't be a jiffy."

       We set off under a big full moon, bigger than you see in the north, for Mahalingam's bungalow, which was off the Taiping road, easy to find since it was in the grounds of his waterworks. It was warm and damp and I wriggled to detach my damp shirt from my damp back. "How are you feeling?" Philip asked. All right, I said. "Don't eat too much of what he offers. Cold grease, you know. Things looking like toads in warm syrup. Chilies, give you the squitters. Gallons of Beehive brandy, just to show how well off he is. Get offended if you 2 refuse, white man scorning their hospitality sort of thing. Say you've been ill, telling no lie after all, but you just had to come. Knew some delightful Tamils in Ceylon or somewhere. Touchy as hell, some of these people. When I first came here I tried to be matey, you know, sitting at tables with them in drinking shops, chewing the fat. Then one day one of them said to me, Bengali he was, you know, Dr. Shawcross, I despise you. That gave me a shock, I can tell you, but I said why? Because, he said, you lower yourself by drinking with people like me. Oh my God." Flying beetles kept crashing into the windscreen, leaving a deposit like a fingerful of cream and jam. "Look, a flying fox." A burong hantu or ghost bird or white owl swooped into the headlights, beaked something green and squirming, then swooped up back into the dark. What looked like a small brown bear hared across the road from jungle to jungle. "Yes, a beruang it's called. A bit like bruin, coincidence of course. Wonderful country for animal life, but the beasts get sick too. Scabby old tigers, monkey corpses falling from the coconut trees like coconuts. A big dead python, long as a street, lying in a monsoon drain, a whole menagerie gnawing it."