The collected stories (48 page)

I slept badly myself that night, thinking of Alec's ridiculous cure

- he had truly gone bush - but I was tied up all day with visa inquiries and it was not until the following evening that I got back to Ladysmith's. I was determined to take him away. I had aspirin at my house; I'd keep him away from Alec.

Downstairs, I called out and knocked as usual to warn him I'd come, and as usual there was no response from him. I entered the bedroom and saw him asleep, but uncovered. Perhaps the fever had passed: his face was dry. He did not look well, but then few people do when they're sound asleep - most take on the ghastly color of illness. Then I saw that the amber bottle was empty - the 'aspirin' bottle.

I tried to feel his pulse. Impossible: I've never been able to feel a person's pulse, but his hand was cool, almost cold. I put my ear against his mouth and thought I could detect a faint purr of respiration.

It was dusk when I arrived, but darkness in Ayer Hitam fell quickly, the blanket of night dropped and the only warning was the sound of insects tuning up, the chirrup of geckoes and those squeaking bats making for the tree. I switched on the lamp and as I did so heard a low cry, as of someone dying in dreadful pain. And there by the window - just as Ladysmith had described - I saw the moonlit faces of two Chinese women, smeared with blood. They opened their mouths and howled; they were toothless and their screeches seemed to gain volume from that emptiness.

'Stop!' I shouted.

DENGUE FEVER

The two faces in those black rags hung there, and I caught the whiff of the tree which was the whiff of wounds. It should have scared me, but it only surprised me. Ladysmith had prepared me, and I felt certain that he had passed that horror on. I stepped forward, caught the cord, and dropped the window blinds. The two faces were gone.

This took seconds, but an after-image remained, like a lamp switched rapidly on and off. I gathered up Ladysmith. Having lost weight he was very light, pathetically so. I carried him downstairs and through the garden to the road.

Behind me, in the darkness, was the rattle of pedals, the squeak of a bicycle seat. The phantom cyclists! It gave me a shock, and I tried to run, but carrying Ladysmith I could not move quickly. The cycling noises approached, frantic squeakings at my back. I spun round.

It was a trishaw, cruising for fares. I put Ladysmith on the seat, and running alongside it we made our way to the mission hospital.

A stomach pump is little more than a slender rubber tube pushed into one nostril and down the back of the throat. A primitive device: I couldn't watch. I stayed until Ladysmith regained consciousness. But it was useless to talk to him. His stomach was empty and he was coughing up bile, spewing into a bucket. I told the nursing sister to keep an eye on him.

I said, 'He's got dengue.'

The succeeding days showed such an improvement in Ladysmith that the doctors insisted he be discharged to make room for more serious cases. And indeed everyone said he'd made a rapid recovery. Alec was astonished, but told him rather sternly, 'You should be ashamed of yourself for taking that overdose.'

Ladysmith was well, but I didn't have the heart to send him back to that empty house. I put him up at my place. Normally, I hated houseguests - they interfered with my reading and never seemed to have much to do themselves except punish my gin bottle. But Ladysmith was unobtrusive. He drank milk, he wrote letters home. He made no mention of his hallucinations, and I didn't tell him what I'd thought I'd seen. In my own case I believe his suggestions had been so strong that I had imagined what he had seen - somehow shared his own terror of the toothless women.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (i): THE CONSUL'S FILE

One day at lunch Ladysmith said, 'How about eating out tonight? On me. A little celebration. After all, you saved my life.'

'Do you feel well enough to face the club buffet?'

He made a face. 'I hate the Club - no offense. But I was thinking of a meal in town. What about that kedai - City Bar? I had a terrific meal there the week I arrived. I've been meaning to go back.'

'You're the boss.'

It was a hot night. The verandah tables were taken, so we had to sit inside, jammed against a wall. We ordered meehoon soup, spring rolls, pork strips, fried kway-teow, and a bowl of laksa that seemed to blister the lining of my mouth.

'One thing's for sure,' said Ladysmith, 'I won't get dengue fever again for a while. The sister said I'm immune for a year.'

'Thank God for that,' I said. 'By then you'll be back in Caribou, Maine.'

'I don't know,' he said. 'I like it here.'

He was smiling, glancing around the room, poking noodles into his mouth. Then I saw him lose control of his chopsticks. His jaw dropped, he turned pale, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cry.

'Is anything wrong?'

He shook his head, but he looked stricken.

'It's this food,' I said. 'You shouldn't be eating such strong-'

'No,' he said. 'It's those pictures.'

On the whitewashed wall of the kedai was a series of framed photographs, old hand-colored ones, lozenge-shaped, like huge lockets. Two women and some children. Not so unusual; the Chinese always have photographs of relations around - a casual reverence. One could hardly call them a pious people; their brand of religion is ancestor worship, the simple display of the family album. But I had not realized until then that Woo Boh Swee's relations had had money. The evidence was in the pictures: both women were smiling, showing large sets of gold dentures.

'That's them,' said Ladysmith.

'Who?' I said. Staring at them I noticed certain wrinkles of familiarity, but the Chinese are very hard to tell apart. The cliche is annoyingly true.

Ladysmith put his chopsticks down and began to whisper: 'The women in my room - that's them. That one had blood on her hair, and the other one-'

DENGUE FEVER

'Dengue fever,' I said. 'You said they didn't have any teeth. Now I ask you - look at those teeth. You've got the wrong ladies, my boy.'

'No!'

His pallor had returned, and the face I saw across the table was the one I had seen on that pillow. I felt sorry for him, and as helpless as I had before.

Woo Boh Swee, the owner of City Bar, went by the table. He was brisk, snapping a towel. 'Okay? Anything? More beer? What you want?'

'We're fine, Mr Woo,' I said. 'But I wonder if you can tell us something. We were wondering who those women are in the pictures - over there.'

He looked at the wall, grunted, lowered his head, and simply walked away, muttering.

'I don't get it,' I said. I left the table and went to the back of the bar, where Boh Swee's son Reggie - the 'English' son - was playing mahjong. I asked Reggie the same question: who are they?

'I'm glad you asked me,' said Reggie. 'Don't mention them to my father. One's his auntie, the other one's his sister. It's a sad story. They were cut up during the war by the dwarf bandits. That's what my old man calls them in Hokkien. The Japanese. It happened over at the headquarters - what they used for headquarters when they occupied the town. My old man was in Singapore.'

'But the Japanese were only here for a few months,' I said.

'Bunch of thieves,' said Reggie. 'They took anything they could lay their hands on. They used those old ladies for house girls, at the headquarters, that big house, where the tree is. Then they killed them, just like that, and hid the bodies - we never found the graves. But that was before they captured Singapore. The British couldn't stop them, you know. The dwarf bandits were clever - they pretended they were Chinese and rode all the way to the Causeway on bicycles.'

I looked back at the table. Ladysmith was staring, his eyes again bright with fever, staring at those gold teeth.

THE SOUTH MALAYSIA PINEAPPLE GROWERS ASSOCIATION

Angela's stories; she had a story to explain the behavior of every Footlighter and, it was said, most planter families. That exclamation at sundown was all :he Footlighters knew of Jan on the evening they met to pick a new play. She was a pale girl, perhaps twenty-six, with a small head and damp nervous eyes. Some of the male Foot-lighters had spoken to Jan's husband; they had found him hearty, with possibilities backstage, but mainly interested in fishing.

Angela was chairing the meeting; they had narrowed the selection to Private Lives and The World of Suzie Wong, and before anyone asked her opinion, Jan said, 'We did Private Lives in Nigeria.' It was an innocent remark, but Jan was slightly impatient and gave it a dogmatic edge, which surprised the rest into silence.

'Oh, really?' said Angela in her intimating bass after a pause. She trilled the r as she would have done on stage, and she glared at Jan.

'Yes, urn,' said Jan, 'I played Amanda. Rupert helped with the sets.' She smiled and closed her eyes, remembering. 'What a night that was. It rained absolute buckets.'

'Maybe we should put it on here,' said Duff Gillespie. 'We need some rain over at my place.'

Everyone laughed, Angela loudest of all, and Jan said, 'It's a very witty play. Two excellent women's parts and lots of good lines.'

'Epicene,' said Tony Evans.

'I've noticed,' said Henry Eliot, a white-haired man who usually played fathers, 'that when you use a big word, Tony, you never put it in a sentence. It's rather cowardly.'

'That's who we're talking about,' said Tony, affecting rather than speaking in the Welsh accent that was natural to him. 'Noel Coward.'

'Too-bloody-shay,' said Duff, 'pardon my French.'

Jan looked from face to face; she wondered if they were making fun of her.

'That settles it,' said Angela. 'Suzie Wong it is.'

'When did we decide that?' asked Henry, making a face.

'You didn't,' said Angela, 7 did. We can't have squabbling.' She smiled at Jan. 'You'll find me fantastically dictatorial, my dear. Pass me that script, would you, darling?' Angela took the gray booklet that Tony Evans had been flipping through. She put it on the table, opened it decisively to Cast, in Order of Their

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (i): THE CONSUL'S FILE

Appearance, and ran the heel of her hand down the fold, flattening it. She said, 'Now for the cast.'

At eleven-thirty, all the main parts had been allotted. 'Except one,' said Jan.

'I beg your pardon,' said Angela.

'I mean, it's all set, isn't it? Except that we haven't -' She looked at the others '- we haven't decided the biggest part, have we?'

Angela gave Jan her look of incredulity. She did it with wintry slowness, and it made Jan pause and know she had said something wrong. So Jan laughed, it was a nervous laugh, and she said, 'I mean, who's Suzie?'

'Who indeed?' said Henry in an Irish brogue. He took his pipe out of his mouth to chuckle; then he returned the pipe and the chuckling stopped. He derived an unusual joy from watching two women disagree. His smile showed triumph.

'You've got your part,' said Angela, losing control of her accent. 'I should say it's a jolly good one.'

'Oh, I know that!' Jan said. 'But I was wondering about-' She looked at the table and said, 'I take it you're going to play Suzie.'

'Unless anyone has any serious objections,' said Angela. No one said a word. Angela addressed her question to Jan, 'Do you have any serious objections?'

'Well, not serious objections,' said Jan, trying to sound good-humored.

'Maybe she thinks-' Duff started.

Angela interrupted, 'Perhaps I'm too old for the part, Jan, is that what you're trying to say?'

'God, not that,' said Jan, becoming discomposed. 'Honestly Angela, I think you're perfect for it, really I do.'

'What is it then?'

Jan seemed reluctant to begin, but she had gone too far to withdraw. Her hands were clasped in her lap and now she was speaking to Duff, whose face was the most sympathetic. 'I don't want to make this sound like an objection, but the point is, Suzie is supposed to be, well, Chinese . . . and, Angela, you're not, um, Chinese. Are you?'

'Not as far as I know,' said Angela, raising a laugh. The laughter subsided. 'But I am an actress.'

THE SOUTH MALAYSIA PINEAPPLE GROWERS ASSOCIATION

Suzie.' Jan became eager. 'I'm terribly excited about this production, really I am. But what if we got a Chinese girl from town to play Suzie. I mean, a real Chinese girl, with one of those dresses slit up the side and that long black hair and that sort of slinky-'

Angela's glare prevented Jan from going any further.

'It's a challenging role,' said Angela, switching her expression from one of disapproval to one of profound interest. 'But so are they all, and we must be up to it. Henry is going to play the old Chinese man. Would you prefer that Stanley did it?'

Stanley Chee, a man of sixty, with gold-rimmed glasses and a starched uniform, was Head Boy of the Club, and at that moment he could be seen - all heads turned - through the bar door, looking furtive as he wiped a bottle.

Jan shook her head from side to side.

'It's going to be a hard grind,' said Angela, and she smiled. 'But that's what acting is. Being someone else. Completely. That's what I tell all the new people.'

THE BUTTERFLY OF THE LARUTS

extended some fifteen miles to the kampong. There had been, he said, half a dozen tribesmen - Laruts, they were called - squatting at the trampled mouth of the path. Squibb said they were waiting for her and that they might have been there, roosting like owls, for days.

We had seen anthropologists before. Their sturdy new clothes and neatly packed rucksacks, tape recorders and parcels of books and paper, gave them away immediately. But Dr Smith caused a local sensation. No one since Sir Hugh Clifford had studied the Laruts; they were true natives, small people with compressed negroid features, clumsy innocent faces, and long arms, who had been driven into the interior as the Malays and Chinese crowded the peninsula. There were few in the towns. You saw them unexpectedly tucked in the bends of bush roads, with the merchandise they habitually sold - red and yellow parrots, flapping things snared in the jungle, unused to the ingeniously woven Larut cages; and orchids harvested from the trunks of forest trees; and butterflies, as large as those orchids, mounted lopsidedly in cigar boxes. The Laruts were our savages, proof we were civilized: Malays especially measured themselves by them. Their movements, jinking in the forest, were like the flights of the butterflies they sold on the roadsides with aboriginal patience. Selling such graceful stuff was appropriate to this gentle tribe, for as was well known, they were nonviolent: they did not make weapons, they didn't fight. They had been hunted for sport, like frail deer, by early settlers. As the Malays and the Chinese grew more quarrelsome and assertive, the Laruts responded by moving further and further inland, until they came to rest on hillsides and in swamps, enduring the extremes of landscape to avoid hostile contact.

Bur Dr Smith found them, and a week later there were no Laruts on the road, no butterflies for sale, only the worn patches on the grassy verge where they had once waited with their cages and boxes, smoking their oddly shaped clay pipes.

At the Club, Angela said, 'I expect we'll see her in town buying clothes.' But no one saw her, nor did we see much of the Laruts. They had withdrawn, it seemed, to the deepest part of the forest, and their absence from the roads made those stretches particularly cheerless. We guessed at what might be going on in the Larut kampong, and with repetition our guesses acquired all the neatness and authority of facts. Then we had a witness.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (i): THE CONSUL'S FILE

Squibb went to the area; he brought back this story. He had borrowed a motorbike at one of his substations and had ridden it over the bush track until at last he came to the outskirts of the kampong. He saw some children playing and asked them in Malay if 'the white queen' was around. They took him to her, and he said he was astonished to see her kneeling in the dust by a hut, pounding some food in a mortar with several Larut women. They were stripped to the waist and chanting.