The Empire Trilogy (160 page)

The car had hardly come to a stop when they saw the Major signalling to them from the verandah. They could tell from his expression that something was wrong. Kate's heart sank: her parents must have found out already what she had been up to. But it turned out to be something else which was troubling the Major. He waited until they had got out of the car and come quite close. Then he said grimly: ‘Penang has fallen. François has just got back from there. It seems incredible but I'm afraid there's no doubt about it.'

As Kate walked home through the compound she thought: ‘With all the fuss nobody will worry about me going to the cinema, at any rate.'

When Matthew and the Major followed her to the Blacketts' house a few minutes later they found an atmosphere of despondency and alarm. Mrs Blackett was worried about her brother, Charlie, who had returned to his regiment only three days earlier after a spell of comparative safety in Singapore. Had there been a big defeat and, if so, had the Punjabis been involved in it? Nobody knew, of course. For all anyone knew the Punjabis were still safely lodged in some barracks in Kuala Lumpur. Walter, though showing concern for his wife's anxiety, was less worried about Charlie than about the general situation: Penang was such a familiar part of his life in Malaya that it seemed inconceivable that it should fall to the Japanese. Moreover, he was indignant that he should have had no prior warning from the authorities that such a disaster might occur. As for Monty, he was worried about his own prospects: he was afraid that unless he was careful he might end up having to fight Japanese himself. Everything was going wrong these days. All this ghastly wedding furore and now Penang. He could hardly even find anyone to talk to! Even Sinclair Sinclair seemed determined to give up his staff job and rejoin his regiment, the Argylls, if he could wangle it. Why he should want to go and get himself killed was more than Monty could fathom. Monty had been hoping that Sinclair might be able to use some influence on his behalf if the worst came to the worst, but he only seemed interested in getting shot at.

Of all the guests who assembled for supper at the Blacketts' only Dr Brownley and Dupigny did not seem dismayed by the fall of Penang. The former went around shaking hands with everyone politely and murmuring to them in a soothing voice, as if in the presence of a mortal illness. ‘Sad news, I'm afraid,' he whispered to Matthew, who was startled to see him winking and nodding. But this was only a nervous idiosyncrasy, it appeared. The Doctor had entered accompanied by Dupigny whose wounds he had been dressing. Despite these wounds Dupigny seemed in good spirits. A dressing had been applied to one side of his face with sticking plaster and there was another dressing on the back of his skull where the hair had been partly shaved away to accommodate it. Nevertheless, his eyes glinted with malicious pleasure as he surveyed the despondent scene in the Blacketts' drawing-room. This was for two reasons: firstly, the Blacketts had behaved so condescendingly towards him since the fall of France that he found it agreeable to see them in a humbler frame of mind; secondly, it vindicated all the sombre predictions he had been making for the past few months concerning the Japanese to the general amusement of Singapore. Moreover, in a general way it reinforced all his deterministic beliefs about the way nations behave.

For Dupigny a nation resembled a very primitive human being: this human being consisted of, simply, an appetite and some sort of mechanism for satisfying the appetite. In the case of a nation the appetite was usually, if not quite invariably, economic … (now and again the national vanity which at intervals gripped nations like France and Britain would compel them to some act which made no sense economically: but in this respect, too, they resembled human beings). As for the mechanism for fulfilling the appetite, what was that but a nation's armed forces? The more powerful the armed forces the better the prospects for satiating the appetite; the more powerful the armed forces the more likely (indeed, inevitable, in Dupigny's view) that an attempt
would be made
to satiate it; just as heavyweight boxers are more frequently involved in tavern brawls than, say, dentists, so the very existence of power demands that it should be used. His own failure in Indo-China had merely confirmed him in his cynical views. The League of Nations? Nothing but a pious waste of time!

‘Never mind, he's had a good innings,' the Doctor observed soothingly to no one in particular, while Matthew, who was sitting on a sofa nearby, gazed at him baffled by this remark for which he could see no sane explanation. Joan came to sit beside him and he realized with a mild shock: ‘People must now think we're
a couple
!' He could not think of anything to say to her, however. She said in an undertone: ‘Poor Monty, they keep trying to call him up for the F.M.S. Volunteers. But, of course, he's doing essential war work and can't possibly go. Besides, they can hardly be “volunteers” if they're forcing him to join, can they?' Matthew had to agree that, strictly speaking … She ignored him, however, and went on: ‘I do believe that François is wearing new clothes.'

It was true. After months of appearing in the threadbare suit he had managed to salvage in his flight from Saigon Dupigny was now smartly dressed in a new shirt, new trousers, and a new linen jacket, not to mention a splendid pair of gleaming shoes. This elegant attire he had succeeded, not without difficulty, in looting from a burning shop in George Town. The bandages which swathed the fingers and palms of both hands were the result of this gallant effort, though he did not say so when anyone remarked on them, implying diffidently instead that he had been obliged to rescue someone (himself, as it happened: he had spent too long searching for clothes that were the right size) from a blazing building where he had been trapped by a beam which had fallen across his foot. ‘With the roof about to fall,' he was explaining modestly to Mrs Blackett as he gingerly accepted a
pahit
from the Chinese boy's tray, ‘it was necessary to pick it up with the bare hands, otherwise he would not have had a chance, the poor fellow.'

Walter, overhearing this, frowned at Dupigny, not because he disbelieved this story, but to indicate that he should speak guardedly in front of the ‘boy'; because if news of the disaster which had befallen Penang, a town which had been British for centuries, should circulate among the natives, what would be the state of their morale? The Major noticed Walter's frown and knew what he was thinking. But he also knew that Walter's precaution was futile, for had not Cheong told him of the fall of Penang that morning before anyone else had heard of it? The Major was doubly distressed to think that the Europeans had been evacuated from Penang while the rest of the population had been left to make the best of it.

Joan's place beside Matthew on the sofa had been taken by Monty, who said gloomily: ‘You've heard they're trying to shove me into the bloody Volunteers?'

‘Joan just told me.'

‘They're being frightfully sticky about it. And now all this about Penang. If you ask me they're making a complete mess of things.' Monty sighed, wondering if he could get himself sent on a trade mission to Australia or America. To think that a few days ago life had seemed perfectly OK!

Dupigny, surrounded by a sombre group, was describing the nightmare journey he had made from Penang to KL. The last fifty miles he had travelled in a lorry belonging to a Chinese rubber dealer who had been out collecting rubber from small-holdings. One of the drawbacks to this vehicle was that there had been nothing to screen the engine from themselves. It had been right there with them in the cab, so that every time the driver accelerated there had been great flashes of flame from the fuel chamber, not to mention spurts of water from the radiator. The only seat for both himself and the Chinese had been a plank on a wooden box. To make matters worse there was no way of fastening the door: at every turn he risked plunging out into the rainy jungle. From time to time, when the engine faltered on an incline, the Chinese had leaned forward to grope encouragingly in the entrails, putting his hand on the carburettor to supply a choke or pinning a raw wire against the metal of the cab to sound the horn. The wiring festooned everywhere had sparkled like a Christmas tree and every few miles he, Dupigny, had been obliged to cool his heels while the Chinese crawled into the lorry's intestines with a spanner to perform some major operation. By the time they had reached KL, thanks to the flames, the boiling water and the steam from the engine, he had been grilled, boiled and finally poached, like a Dieppe sole! How glad he had been to come upon young Ehrendorf having a drink by himself at the Majestic Hotel opposite the railway station.

‘Did he say how the fighting was going?'

‘He was not cheerful. But he did not say anything specific.'

‘Well, we had better eat,' said Walter, ushering his guests towards the dining-room. ‘Perhaps things are not quite as bad as they seem.'

Penang, after all, was almost five hundred miles away. There was still plenty of territory between themselves and the Japanese. Still, although of little importance commercially, Penang had always been a part of the Blacketts' world. Now they felt the ground beginning to shift under their feet.

The meal would have been lugubrious indeed if Dr Brownley had not been there. At first he had been uneasy, inclined to think: ‘Good gracious, this makes it twenty-two times in a row that they've invited me here and I still haven't invited them back!' But he was a doctor, after all, and could see that this evening the Blacketts needed the comfort of some more familiar topic to occupy their minds. And what better than the Langfields? A long time ago he had discovered that there was nothing that could make a Blackett feel himself again so swiftly as a Langfield (or vice versa, of course, for both these eminent Singapore families were the Doctor's patients). Should a Blackett find himself suffering from depression, insomnia or loss of appetite, it would usually take no more than a faintly disparaging remark about the Langfields' style of life, their furniture or curtains, say, to effect a cure. On other occasions, when a thorough quickening of the blood was indicated, as in cases of migraine, back-ache, severe constipation or the loss of concentration which Mrs Blackett increasingly suffered as she grew older, stronger meat was sometimes required. Then the Doctor would disclose some more serious matter, the Langfields' reluctance to pay their bills, or their attempts to claim they had paid when they had not, or requests for medical attention on social occasions. As he had dined regularly with both families over the years and with each had concluded that the only topic of conversation guaranteed to please was the other, he had, perhaps, not been as sparing with this drug as he should. It had come about, indeed, that nowadays, just to maintain the family in normal health, he felt it necessary as a matter of course to prepare one or two choice bits of gossip and bring them to the table, the way a zoo-keeper brings herrings in a bucket when he visits the sea-lions.

‘Walter, you'd hardly believe the latest about a certain family (I won't say who, mind, but it's no secret they live on Nassim Road)! Well, it seems that they've really outdone themselves this time!' And the Doctor chuckled conspiratorially, looking round the table. The Blacketts, shocked though they were by the loss of Penang, disturbed by thoughts of the future, felt nevertheless a slight alleviation of their burden. The Doctor cut away busily at his veal cutlet, taking his time but still chuckling, while the Blacketts put aside thoughts of Penang in flames and focused their attention on him. ‘Yes,' thought the Doctor as he began to enlarge on an example of the Langfields' shortcomings, ‘that's what they need. Something to take their minds off it.'

In no time at all one herring after another was describing a glistening arc over the dining-table to be deftly plucked out of the air by one whiskered Blackett head after another. Presently, only the Major, Dupigny and Matthew were sitting there without the head and tail of a fish protruding from their mouths. What was all this about? they wondered. And what did it have to do with Penang?

Matthew, in his excitement and concern over this serious news from Penang had not been paying proper attention to the amount of alcohol he had been drinking. He had been absent-mindedly swallowing one glass of wine after another and now he was far from sober. He was bored with the Doctor and his chat about the Langfields: it seemed to him ridiculous and unworthy that they should be chatting in such a suburban vein at this historic moment when great events were brewing all around them, when a new and terrible link was being forged in the chain of events which reached back to the first betrayal of justice at the League. Instead they should be talking about, well … no matter
what
, provided it expressed one's real feelings. This was a moment to discuss matters which one does not normally mention on social occasions for fear of making oneself ridiculous or embarrassing one's friends; love and death, for example. Presently, inspired by Walter's claret, he decided that this might be a good moment in which to make the proposal of marriage to Joan which he had intended to make earlier in the afternoon. He looked at her: never had the modelling of her cheekbones seemed so exquisite! Never had her sable curls glowed more richly! He felt moved by her beauty, or perhaps it was simply by the wine and the spice of risk which had been added to life by the news from Penang. Suddenly, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

Silence fell around the table. The Blacketts gazed at him in surprise. He stood there for a moment without saying anything, leaning forward slightly with his knuckles on the polished surface of the table. ‘A sad occasion,' muttered the Doctor at his side, looking rather put out, for Matthew had interrupted a choice anecdote by so boorishly rising to his feet. Matthew, while his audience waited, combed his mind for the various things he wanted to say … he knew what they were (they had been there only a moment ago), and he knew he must say them from the heart.