The Empire Trilogy (173 page)

And yet this was the moment, Walter knew in his heart, to adopt some resolute plan, perhaps to conscript a labour force of one's own by closing down other aspects of the business, certain of which would soon close down anyway of their own accord, by transferring estate labour (such of it as had not yet been overrun by the advancing Japanese) to the docks, by offering double wages if necessary, anything provided that rubber was shifted. It was no good for Walter, isolated and overworked as he was, to tell himself that he must not let that rubber get out of proportion … What was it compared to the rubber which had passed through his hands in his time? Nothing! … It seemed to him like a tumour, disfiguring his career in Singapore. And like a tumour it continued to grow because, although diminished in quantity by the Japanese advance and by the increasingly chaotic state of the roads in Johore, new consignments of rubber continued to arrive from across the Causeway.

The fact was that all the options Walter considered were hedged around with administrative difficulties through which he could see no way. In desperation he even considered, though only for a moment, the possibility of forming a co-operative labour force with other firms in a similar, if less acute, predicament … perhaps even with Langfield and Bowser. But that solution, which was probably the only one capable of realization in practice, was denied to Walter by the competitive habits of a lifetime. He could hardly enter into such an agreement without revealing the sheer size of his stocks to his rivals, who would know immediately by the amount of rubber he had waiting that he had made a grotesque miscalculation. To go cap in hand to old Solomon Langfield in Blackett and Webb's jubilee year to propose such a scheme was more than he could bring himself to do. But at this point fate, in the shape of a Japanese bomb, took a hand.

Even taking into account the new-found amity between the two families, you would hardly have expected to see what you now
did
see at the Blacketts' house, the extraordinary spectacle of lions lying down with lambs and scarcely even licking their lips. Walter found himself sitting at his own dining-table surrounded, it seemed, by nothing but Langfields. Even more unexpected was the fact that a similar scene had taken place yesterday and would take place again tomorrow … though with the women-folk subtracted, for this was the eve of their departure for Australia. What then was the explanation? For this was not, needless to say, the company that Walter would have chosen for his evening meal, including as it did, old Solomon Langfield with a slightly condescending expression on his cunning old face and young Nigel, who looked almost human by comparison, sitting next to Joan.

The Langfields on the whole looked subdued, which Walter found reasonably gratifying. Nor was this simply because their family was about to be sundered. The Langfields had suffered a misfortune. A bomb jettisoned at random by a Japanese plane had fallen in Nassim Road, partly destroying their house. None of them had been hurt, fortunately, except for a few scratches. Since the damage had only been to property Walter had felt himself permitted at first to treat the matter as a joke. At the Club, chuckling, he had entertained his friends with what he claimed was an eye-witness description of ‘the bomb on the bear-garden'. The rats and cockroaches that had poured out of the smoking ruins had been nobody's business! And poor oldSolomon wandering about howling with grief. Why? Because he kept his money under his mattress, as everyone knew, and it had been blown up with the rest of the bear-garden! After a while, however, Walter fell silent, having realized that some of his audience were not relishing his joke at Langfield's expense quite as much as he did himself. But Walter was fundamentally a kind-hearted man and he could see that, after all, having your house destroyed could have its unpleasant side. And so he had generously made amends by inviting the Langfields to stay at his house until they had managed to re-establish themselves in their own; besides, since the women-folk were going off together it made sense for the two families to be under the same roof for a while. Walter was considered at the Singapore Club to have emerged, after a shaky start, very creditably from the Langfields' misfortune, given the legendary antipathy between the two families.

Solomon, as it happened, was not looking particularly well. He was getting on in years and had reached the age when a person finds it hard to adjust to a sudden shock like the destruction of his house. Mrs Langfield had confided in Mrs Blackett (the two ladies, having swallowed the distaste of years in a few minutes, had discovered that they had everything in common and had quite as much gossip backed up over the years as Walter had rubber in his warehouses) that it had taken some time for the poor old fellow to be coaxed out of the ruins. He had wanted to stay on there, it appeared! With ceilings which might collapse at any moment! And when he had been told of the invitation to the Blacketts' he had grown more stubborn than ever. In the end Nigel had had to accept the invitation on his behalf and Dr Brownley had had to make a personal visit to the shattered house in Nassim Road to dislodge the old boy.

Dr Brownley, seated opposite old Solomon, might well have been thinking that the old man's face had an unhealthy cast, yellowish with brightly flushed patches. But as a matter of fact he was concentrating more on his supper which was exceptionally appetizing. Walter, drumming absently on the table with a crust of ‘health bread', for to the indignation of Tanglin the Cold Storage had stopped baking white bread on Government orders, surveyed the table and reflected that tomorrow, when the women had sailed for Australia, he would at last have time to get down to some serious work. He would miss them, no doubt, but that could not be helped. Besides, there was always Joan.

At the end of the table Matthew had become involved in a heated discussion with Nigel, odd snatches of which reached Walter's distracted ears … something about colonial policy during the Depression. Matthew, Walter had to admit, had turned out a disappointment. He had grown somewhat thinner during his weeks in Singapore but no less excitable and opinionated. Why, the other day he had even asserted that the European estates had swindled inarticulate native smallholders out of their share of Malaya's rubber exports under the Restriction Scheme. And how, Walter had enquired with an ironical smile, did we manage to do that? How did we manage to do that when assessment was under Government control? The estates had managed to do it through their creature, the Controller of Rubber! By packing the committee formed to ‘advise' him … that was to say, to give him instructions for whatever they wanted to be done so that he could apply the official stamp to them!

‘Don't be an idiot!'

‘I'm not saying you did anything illegal, just that you used your influence to bend the rules in your favour. Isn't that the way it's always done? Come to think of it, that's what my father and his cronies did in the rice trade in Rangoon all those years ago. I suppose that's what business out here consists of.'

Walter had spoken sharply at this point. He was not ready to listen to Matthew saying anything against old Mr Webb who had been the very soul of recitude and one of the pillars of the Singapore community His was an example of honesty and industry which Matthew would do well to follow instead of … of … Walter had been about to say ‘carrying on with half-caste women' but thought better of it at the last moment. He had heard reports that Matthew had been seen with Miss Chiang but did not want to bring the matter up until he was more sure of his ground, for it was out of the question for a Webb to be seen associating openly with a
‘stengah'
, particularly in Blackett and Webb's jubilee year. ‘… Instead of wasting your time,' he had finished rather weakly. Matthew had abandoned the subject, looking depressed.

Matthew was now saying, ‘Far from doing anything to help our colonies foster their own native industries the Colonial Office sees to it that any which begin to develop are promptly scotched!'

‘Why should they do that?' scoffed Nigel Langfield, under the approving eye of his elders. ‘I say, Mr Blackett, what d'you think, sir? Isn't that just the nonsense that the Nationalists are always spouting?'

‘Why?' demanded Matthew heatedly. ‘Because we want to sell our own goods. We don't want competition from the natives: we want to keep them on the estates producing the raw materials we need.'

‘Absolute poppycock, old boy,' chuckled Nigel. ‘Westminster has done a jolly great deal with grants to build up industry in the colonies.'

‘Grants, certainly … but what for? So that they could buy British capital equipment for bridges and railways. The only purpose of these grants was to deal with unemployment in Britain. Funds were produced so that the unfortunate colonies could buy equipment which they could ill afford and which was of dubious advantage to them, though it probably
was
to the advantage of the European businesses established in the colonies!'

Walter could not help glancing at old Solomon Langfield to see how he was responding to these unfortunate remarks. Ah, it was as he feared! On the man's sickly face an expression of amazement and disgust had appeared. Glancing up swiftly the wily old fellow caught Walter's eye before he had time to look away. Promptly his expression changed to one of sarcasm, even glee, as if to say: ‘So this is the sort of degenerate talk that goes on in the Blackett household … I might have known!' But perhaps Walter had merely imagined that his old rival was gloating over him: a moment later Solomon had dropped his chin wearily to his plate once more. He really did look rather ill. Perhaps it was just as well that the doctor was at hand. Much as he detested the Langfields Walter did not particularly want one to die under his roof.

‘In Burma during the Depression there was such a high tax on matches that the natives started a flourishing local industry making cheap cigarette lighters. Guess what happened. The Government, disliking the loss of revenue, suppressed it by instituting heavy fines! Well, by an interesting coincidence the same thing happened in the Dutch East Indies. There, too, cheap cigarette lighters threatened the revenue from matches. But the Dutch allowed them to continue making the lighters on the grounds that it created employment. And the same goes for many other local industries, too … The result is that the Dutch East Indies now have a spinning industry and instead of importing
sarongs
they make their own. The same goes for soap, cigarettes and any number of other things. There's even a native bank to finance native enterprises! And what have we been doing? We've seen to it that even basic things like nails still have to be imported from Britain!'

‘Oh, that's all very well,' blustered Nigel. ‘Anyone can quote isolated facts, but that just distorts the overall picture.' And Nigel flushed, nettled by Matthew's tone and conscious that he had not emerged from this arguement as well as he had hoped, particularly with the beautiful Joan Blackett sitting in silent judgement at his elbow. What a smasher she was! Nigel particularly liked the way the light fell on her curly hair, making it glow like … like …

‘Matthew doesn't know anything, Nigel, about what things are really like here,' said Joan suddenly and in such a bitter tone that even Nigel peered at her in surprise, delighted, however, that she should take his side.

Walter had been listening attentively to the exchange between the two young men at the end of the table. As he listened his face had darkened and the bristles on his spine had risen, causing his Lancashire cotton shirt and even the jacket of his linen suit to puff up into a hump. Distracted though she was by her imminent departure, Mrs Blackett had noticed the warning signs and held her breath, afraid lest her husband explode at any moment. But just as it had seemed that an explosion of rage was inevitable, Walter's thoughts had abruptly been diverted into a more soothing channel by his daughter's defence of Nigel. And so promising was this new channel that within a few moments those horrid bristles had subsided and were nestling peacefully once more flat against Walter's coarse pink skin. Walter had begun to have ideas about young Nigel Langfield.

Walter had known Nigel since childhood; according to the general proposition that Langfields only became odious and unsuitable on reaching puberty, he had often been permitted to come as a child to play with Monty just as now Melanie came to play with Kate. And naturally, even after Nigel had made the change from acceptable tadpole to unacceptable frog, Walter had continued to see him here or there for they belonged, of course, to the same clubs and it was inevitable that the young man should crop up in Walter's field of vision over the years carrying now a tennis racket, now a briefcase, Singapore being a very small world, after all. Nevertheless it was only now that the bombed-out Langfields had assembled under his roof that Walter was at last really able to form an opinion about the young man: on the whole he had been agreeably surprised. Nigel had the right ideas. He was not, like Monty, a wash-out. On the contrary, from what he had overheard passing between Nigel and his father the young man was already active in the affairs of Langfield and Bowser. Walter, preoccupied though he was this evening with other matters, had not failed to notice that every now and again Nigel's eyes would surreptitiously come to rest on Joan and contemplate her avidly. A young man's normal stirrings of lust, perhaps? No, Walter did not think so. He believed that there might be more to it than that. For Nigel was making every effort to be agreeable to Joan and once or twice, for no apparent reason, a deep blush had stained the young man's cheeks, which were, incidentally, still pleasantly freckled like those of a child.

Yes, Walter was still faced with the problem of finding a husband for Joan. How times had changed that he should now be giving serious consideration to an offspring of the Langfields! But a businessman must adapt his views to meet changing times; otherwise he will be left high and dry. Walter had not forgotten (how often had he not repeated it to little Monty when the lad was still in the nursery) the fate of the rice-millers in London who had gone to their doom because they had been unable to foresee the effects that the opening of the Suez Canal would have on their trade. A man must move with the times. If a union of the Blacketts and the Langfields was what the times called for, then so be it. Moreover, the more Walter thought about it, the more it seemed to him that this might be the master-stroke that solved all his problems simultaneously. If the two firms were merged into a new company, Blackett, Webb and Langfield, then the danger that Matthew Webb might one day use his holdings to force some independent, hare-brained, moralistic policy on the Blackett interest would automatically disappear. Matthew's stake would be diluted. Of course, he would have the problem of imposing his will on the Langfield interest but old Solomon would not last for ever and Walter was confident that with Joan's help he could deal easily enough with young Nigel. Why, a union of the two families might even help him solve the more immediate problem of shipping his rubber by putting him in a better position to suggest some joint solution of the difficulty to Solomon.