The Empire Trilogy (138 page)

‘Yes, er, I see what you mean,' mumbled Monty cautiously, ‘but about that other matter we were discussing. I mean, well, you think it over. There's no need to make a snap decision, Matthew. On the other hand we do know plenty of blokes who would jump at the chance if we offered it to them, so you can't keep us waiting indefinitely.'

‘But I'm not keeping you waiting, Monty. I've told you, I'm not…'

‘No, well, you think it over,' muttered Monty hastily. ‘No need to make a snap decision.' And he started to explain to the rather bewildered Matthew how to set about dancing with a taxi-dancer. You first of all had to buy a book of four twenty-five-cent dance tickets from the bloke over there. Then when music started you made a dash for the one you liked the look of. But you had to make it snappy or someone else would grab her. At the end of the dance she took you back to her table and you handed over a ticket. You weren't allowed to sit with them unless you paid a special fifteen-dollar fee for taking them away from the taxi tables.

‘Thanks Monty, but I think I just want to watch.'

‘You would!' murmured Monty inaudibly.

Meanwhile, however, the tango had turned into an exhibition by a Filipino couple who were chased somewhat haphazardly round the floor by a white spotlight; the man was a foxy-looking individual in a white suit, the woman, a sinuous person in sequins with flashing eyes and raven tresses. The music changed tempo and they began jitterbugging violently, shoes flashing. The grinning members of the band were also from the Philippines; clad in dazzling white blazers and orange trousers they formed a shallow bank against the far wall, harmonizing satisfactorily with the lurid, unlikely birds which had been painted on it. Overhead, painted on the ceiling, Matthew could just make out the shape of a gigantic golden dragon whose bulging eyes, faceted with mirrors, showered reflected sparks like confetti on the swaying dancers below. Now the spotlight, outguessed by the movement of the dancers, strayed for a moment to the edge of the floor and hesitated there by coincidence on Joan and Ehrendorf. He was talking intensely into her ear while she stared unseeing at the polished floor, tapping her foot moodily to the beat of the music. He looked up for a moment, dazzled and bewildered; Joan shook her head, tossing her hair. The spotlight moved jerkily away in pursuit of its quarry.

Saddened by the look of desperation on his friend's face, Matthew shifted his attention to the taxi-girls sitting at tables beside the floor, wondering whether the girl whose breast he had found himself clasping earlier in the evening might not be among them: these girls, too, appeared to be Chinese or Eurasian for the most part, with a few Malays, Siamese and Indo-Chinese; undoubtedly, thought Matthew, these women from further up the peninsula towards China were the loveliest and most graceful of all with their glistening black eyes and delicate features: beside them even the delicate Joan looked clumsy, heavy and rough-skinned. Ehrendorf, however, did not seem to think so for he had taken Joan by the wrist and was trying to persuade her to join him on the floor which, temporarily deserted, now began to fill up. The band set to work on another tune. Men of all descriptions, from dimunitive Chinese clerks to enormous tipsy Australians, swarmed across the floor to secure the services of the taxi-girls. Ehrendorf tried to lead Joan on to the dance-floor but she resisted, snatching her hand away from him. Ehrendorf then seemed to give up hope all of a sudden: his chest deflated, his shoulders drooped, he passed a hand over his forehead as if dazed.

‘Well, have you thought it over about that nifty Chinese girl I was telling you about?'

‘Monty, I told you before: it's not my line.'

Monty looked taken aback: ‘There's no need to decide right away, old boy. I don't want to rush you. And look here, if you have only one evening a week we could probably fix it so you don't have to pay quite so much. After all, that's only fair, isn't it? How about fifteen dollars a month? It's really worth it, you know. God, boy, she goes at it hammer and tongs, I can tell you!'

‘It's not the price, for heaven's sake. It's the idea of it.'

Monty stared at Matthew, baffled. It had not occurred to him that Matthew would drive such a hard bargain. Or could there perhaps be some other explanation? And then an idea struck him.

‘If you think you'll get it from her,' he said warningly, indicating his sister who was standing a few paces away, ‘I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree. I know lots of blokes who've been out with her and she doesn't.'

‘Doesn't what?' asked Matthew. And then added hurriedly: ‘Oh, sorry, I see what you mean …'

But Monty, nevertheless, uttered the heavy sigh of someone whose patience has been tried beyond endurance. ‘She doesn't,' he repeated. And then, just to rub it in: ‘Not even
occasionally
!'

Matthew's head was reeling as he and Monty and Joan passed out of The Great World and into Kim Seng Road; for a moment he felt quite giddy and had to steady himself with a hand on the wall. Ehrendorf, shattered, had left half an hour earlier by himself; before leaving he had said to Joan: ‘We must have a serious talk. I'll look in this evening if you're not back too late.' Joan had replied that he could do what he liked. She was accustomed to young men wanting to have serious talks with her. After a moment Matthew felt well enough to remove his hand from the wall and proceed: it was doubtless the effect of the unaccustomed heat and the crowds which had caused that moment of dizziness. Outside the gate there were fewer people to be seen; the stars shone brilliantly and the night seemed less oppressive.

They had only taken a few steps in the direction of River Valley Road when Joan said grimly: ‘I'm going home. I've had enough for one evening.'

‘But it's not even ten o'clock yet!' protested Monty indignantly. ‘We can't turn in at this hour, particularly now we've got rid of Romeo. Besides, we're supposed to be showing Matthew the town.'

Matthew announced that he, too, felt he had seen enough for one evening. His spell of giddiness a few moments earlier had left him with a feeling that everything he had witnessed was utterly unreal. But Monty would not hear of another defection. He said to Joan: ‘Why don't you take the Pontiac if you aren't going to come with us? We'll take a taxi.'

Presently, Matthew found himself in a taxi with Monty and heading, not for Raffles Hotel which Monty said would be full of stuffed shirts and only open till midnight anyway, but for some more interesting destination which Monty knew of. The taxi was a little yellow Ford 8 with springs that chimed and wheezed at every bump in the road. At the end of Grange Road they came into Orchard Road again, then into Bras Basah Road. Now they were drawing near the sea and a great white building loomed up on the left: Raffles Hotel, Monty said. As they passed the brilliantly lit entrance on the landward side Matthew glimpsed an elderly couple leaving, the man in a black dinner-jacket, the woman in a long glittering evening-dress and stole. Monty chuckled at the crowd of natives who had gathered on Beach Road to watch the Europeans dining on the lawn beneath the tall pencil palms. ‘That's the nightly show for the Asiatics. They think white women are whores the way they wear backless evening gowns. They come here every evening and lick their lips.'

At Monty's direction the taxi turned away from Raffles Hotel along the sea-front. On the right now was the starlit expanse of the
padang
and beyond it, just visible against the sky, the dignified silhouette of the former Grand Hôtel de l'Europe, the benefits of whose dance-floor Matthew had longed in retrospect to transfer to Geneva. The driver evidently knew what was expected of him without having to be told, for their progress had slowed to a crawl and he had half turned in his seat awaiting further instructions. Monty was peering intently at the shadowy figures of women sitting in rickshaws or standing idly in groups of two or three beneath the trees which lined the road. ‘Stop!' he said, and the taxi drew in to the kerb.

Hardly had they come to a halt when there was a great stirring in the darkness; from what had seemed to be empty rickshaws shadowy figures emerged. Further shapes could be seen shifting in the obscurity beneath the trees; beyond, anchored at sea in the inner roads, were a great number of ships of which only the lights were visible. In a moment, to Matthew's surprise, the open windows of the taxi were entirely filled with women's faces, piled one on top of another like coconuts; shortly the windscreen, too, was blocked by the faces of yet more women leaning over the bonnet. A soft murmur filled the air from which an occasional word in English detached itself: ‘OK John!' … ‘Nice!' … ‘Back all same flont!' ‘Whisky soda!'

Meanwhile, the driver, an elderly Malay with a brown face and the white hair of a grandfather, had groped for an electric torch and shone its beam on one window after the other.

‘Can these be real women?' wondered Matthew as the beam wandered unsteadily over the serried painted masks. Yet on many of these masks the wrinkles stood out despite the paint and powder; the angled light etched them all the more harshly, replacing sunken eyes with a blob of darkness. At the same time, here and there skeletal arms had stretched through the open windows to trail about in the interior of the cab, floating and flickering like sea-weed, plucking weakly at his shirt and trousers, palping his arm or thigh.

‘Hags!' declared Monty. ‘Drive on!'

The driver raced the engine and the windscreen cleared. One or two other faces showed themselves fleetingly in the places of those that had gone: younger, weaker, more innocent, but no less desperate, trawling unhopefully with this brief glimpse of their younger faces for the twin male lusts which they knew were swimming back and forth like sharks somewhere in the depths of the cab. The hands groped more desperately, pleading, tugging, pinching. Then the taxi moved off in a hail of curses and vociferation. One or two of the women even tried to follow in rickshaws, hoping to catch up at the next traffic lights. But in no time they were left behind.

Monty explained, with the weary condescension of an expert, that certain of these women had their own permanent rickshaw coolies, usually ancient, hollowed-out skeletons of men, excavated by the pursuit of their shattering trade in the Singapore heat, who could no longer compete with younger rivals but might still, now and again, whip their broken limbs into a trot to reach some likely looking prospect with their fair cargoes of flesh … by which he meant, he added with a chuckle, those leathery harridans whose services you could always purchase for a few cents. And they weren't all Chinese, Malay or Tamil either, by any manner of means. Sometimes you came across Europeans, yes, women who had ‘gone wrong' in some Eastern city, who had found disgrace through opium or alcohol in Calcutta, Hong Kong or Shanghai … He, Monty, as a student of human nature, took a pretty keen interest in the stories that some of these women could tell you … there were even aristocratic women driven out of Russia in penury by the Revolution. And more recently, as a matter of fact, things had been getting better in Singapore as far as women went. Young Chinese girls had been arriving in droves, refugees from the Sino-Jap war escaping from Shanghai or Canton …

‘Not
better
, Monty!' cried Matthew indignantly. ‘How can you be so heartless!'

‘Oh, I just meant younger, you know,' muttered Monty sullenly. ‘No need to get worked up, old boy. After all, it's not my fault …'

‘But it's all our faults! It's disgraceful! This is supposed to be a prosperous country. We send huge profits back to our fat shareholders in England and yet we can't even provide for a few refugees without them having to go on the streets.'

‘It's no good taking this high moral line out here in the East, you know. People don't go in for that sort of thing out here. It's not our cup of tea. You just have to accept things the way they are. In the Straits it's every man for himself, if you know what I mean, and it's as well not to over-do the pious remarks. Personally, and I think I can speak for a lot of chaps who have been out here a while, I don't care for moralizing, in fact it binds me rigid.' Monty sounded irritated. The evening's entertainment, which had started promisingly with the woman fired from the cannon, had proved the dampest of damp squibs. And now, would you believe it? he could hardly say a word without getting a sermon in return.

‘I'm sorry, Monty. I don't mean to sound prudish. It's just that I think we have a rotten way of doing things when it comes to anything but making money,' replied Matthew absently for, of course, Monty could not be blamed for the plight of Chinese refugees on the sea-front in Singapore. But where then did the fault lie? While Matthew mused on this problem the little yellow taxi turned about and headed north again. It rather looked, said Monty gloomily, as if they would have to settle for a massage somewhere.

Among the painted masks which had peered in through the cab's open windows Matthew had noticed one or two younger faces: he remembered one in particular, of a Chinese girl aged perhaps no more than fifteen or sixteen, rather ugly than pretty, but with a pleasant, homely, elfin ugliness like that of a bulldog, if you can imagine a delicately featured bulldog. Supposing that this girl, as seemed likely, was one of the new recruits that Monty had been talking about, he wondered at what precise moment during the past ten years it had become inevitable that she should be uprooted from her village somewhere in South China, or from a slum in Shanghai, and flung down on the streets of Singapore, obliged to sell herself if she could find a buyer? Surely, suggested Matthew to the passive figure of Monty beside him, one must connect this child's desperate face with the long series of failures he himself had witnessed at the League of Nations in Geneva, with the ever-recurring inability of the Great Powers to commit themselves to a world organized on international lines, with the ever-present cynicism of the Foreign Office, and the Quai d'Orsay, and the Wilhelmstrasse where no opportunity was ever missed for showing the diplomats' professional distaste for open diplomacy or for sneering at the idea of a world parliament. What chilled the blood was the thought that this girl's plight and a million other tiny tragedies had been brought about by suave, neatly barbered, Savile Row-suited, genial, polite, cultured and probably even humane men in normal circumstances who would shrink with horror from themselves if they could be made to see their responsibility for what was happening!