SHE HAD ABSOLUTELY no right to go off like that, especially after all the trouble he had had the previous day, telling lies and dispensing dollars. Didn’t she realise that she was making an absolute fool of him, the laughing-stock of the town, didn’t she know the Abang’s reputation, didn’t she realise that he had only one aim in mind, and by God he would fulfil that aim before very long if Crabbe did not prevent him?
Or had he fulfilled it already?
How dare he indulge in such nasty insinuations! The Abang had been charming, attentive, a model of propriety. Whatever his reputation was, it was something of a change to receive such attentions after all these months, nay years, in which she might as well have been a dirty clothes basket for all the notice her husband took of her. Plenty of time to chase other women, no time at all for his own wife. And for all his promises, it was still going on.
What was still going on?
Oh, she wasn’t such a fool. She saw what was happening under her very nose. Making eyes at Anne Talbot, she recognised all the symptoms. If he was going to live his own life she was going to live hers. Did he not realise that he had not evinced the slightest desire to make love to his own wife for months now? She had been losing confidence in herself; now at last a little of it was being regained. If he didn’t think she was attractive there were others who did.
And so on.
Friday and a school holiday. But Crabbe was awake and up early, long before the time of the bedside tray, aware that something had changed, that something was wrong. In shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, unwashed and unshaven, he went to the kitchen and found it cool and deserted. He called Ah Wing but there was no reply. Perhaps he was ill, perhaps—he swiftly quelled the cruel hope—the old man had died in his sleep. He knocked at Ah Wing’s door, once, twice, then tried the handle. It was unlocked. The room was empty of all the old eggs and lizards and horrible medicines that furnished Ah Wing’s life. Only a picture of Sun Yat Sen remained on the wall, staring glassy-eyed at the new China, amid the smells of the old. Ah Wing had vanished.
Crabbe called Fatimah. Soon she appeared, hair down her back, plump young brown shoulders naked above the sarong she was knotting under her arms. After her sidled a black cat, mewing.
“Tuan?”
“Where is Ah Wing?”
“Gone, tuan. Taken all his belongings.”
Where had he gone? She did not know. All she knew was that two aborigines in torn shirts and nothing else had come to the back of the house late the previous night and Ah Wing had followed them. She had not wanted to disturb Tuan and Mem in the middle of their quarrel to tell them of this.
“Why did he go?”
“Dia takut kapak kechil, tuan.”
So he was frightened of the little axes, was he? Crabbe began to feel an enormous relief welling up in him, like warm blood after a cold shower. Ah Wing had gone, presumably to join his son-in-law in the jungle, to chirp happily over the cooking-pot among snakes and leeches and rusting rifles, gone out of Crabbe’s life for ever. Why he feared the axes Crabbe did not trouble to ask: everybody found cause to fear the axes sooner or later. It was providential that Ah Wing had found cause to fear them at this particular moment of time. Crabbe, elated, would have flung his arms around the desirable plump body of Fatimah and kissed the moist bee-stung lips in gratitude for the words of release they had uttered had he not also fear of the axes. He merely smiled and went back to the kitchen to boil the kettle for tea.
As he sat drinking it and eating bread and marmalade he thought: ‘Now, Mr. Jaganathan, you can do your damnedest. And, Mr. Hardman, you have it coming to you as well.’ There was nothing anyone could do now: the jungle road was closed, the thread of the labyrinth was broken, the tangible evidence had been devoured by the huge green mouth of the forest, and the teeth had snapped shut. And Crabbe himself would celebrate his new-found security with a brief holiday in Kuala Lumpur, in the willing arms of Anne Talbot.
He went back to the bedroom and woke Fenella rudely.
“We’ve no cook. If you want breakfast you’ll have to get it yourself. I’m going off to see Jaganathan.”
“No cook? What do you mean?”
“Ah Wing has left. Don’t ask me why. He’s just gone, that’s all.”
“You seem very pleased about it.”
“I am.”
Jaganathan’s house was a sweltering wooden structure half-way between the College and the town. When Crabbe drew up before it he heard the loud noise of a Tamil day that had long started. Outside the house black pot-bellied children shrieked and tumbled; from within came the sound of loud female scolding. A large dog—brown, shapeless, old but visibly dentate—stretched its chain to taut metal and cursed Crabbe.
“Good dog, good dog. Come on, shake paws, blast you.”
Mr. Jaganathan came to the door, a black flabby sweating chest above a tartan sarong. He greeted Crabbe affably and bade him enter.
“I can’t.”
“The English are said to be so fond of dogs.” Indulgently, Mr. Jaganathan grasped the thick studded collar of the growling hound and let Crabbe go in.
The living-room was full of children, mostly naked. One small boy was eating a cold chapatti on the dusty floor, a baby lying on the dining table, cried piteously for the breast. Jaganathan led Crabbe to an alcove and shooed away two marriageable girls in saris who were seated quietly at their homework. With wide hospitable gestures Jaganathan showed Crabbe to a chair, and the two men looked at each other over a glass-topped table in which were embedded family snapshots, cut-outs of Indian film stars and a Chinese mineral water advertisement.
“You have been thinking, Mr. Crabbe, as I advised you?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Jaganathan.”
“It is very hot day. We do not have fans in this class of government quarters. You would like a refreshing drink, Mr. Crabbe? I have whisky.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Jaganathan.” They always began their interviews thus, with a great travesty of politeness.
“And what conclusion have you come to, Mr. Crabbe?”
“That I am most certainly not going to do as you suggest, Mr. Jaganathan. That if one of us is to go, it is certainly not going to be me.”
Jaganathan smiled winningly, and said, “I think we will both have some whisky, Mr. Crabbe. I have some bottles of soda outside in the well. They should be cool enough.”
‘You drink by all means, Mr. Jaganathan. Not for me, thank you.”
Jaganathan called loudly and a trembling boy appeared. “This fellow is my eldest son,” said Jaganathan. “He is a good-for-nothing. He is only fit to run errands and do work of a menial.” Jaganathan spoke loud burring Tamil, hit the boy on the head, and then watched him run off.
“The other day, Mr. Crabbe, you talked of evidence. Today I will show you my evidence.”
“Show?”
“Yes, Mr. Crabbe. I have a brother-in-law in Singapore. He is in the library of the University there. The University receives publications of all the big universities in England, Mr. Crabbe. I asked him to do little research, Mr. Crabbe, and he looked up all back numbers of the magazine of your University Union, Mr. Crabbe. The result is most interesting.”
A naked female child came round to Crabbe, drooling. Mr. Jaganathan took the child on his knee, watching, with pride, its slow dribble.
“You wrote many articles, Mr. Crabbe, on universal necessity for Communism.”
“Did I, Mr. Jaganathan? You know, I’d completely forgotten.”
“Now you will remember, Mr. Crabbe.”
Crabbe began to feel a certain disappointment. Was this, then, to be the evidence? Jaganathan called loudly again, and again the boy appeared, this time carrying a whisky bottle and a brief-case. Jaganathan roared with anger and cuffed the boy.
“The fool brings neither glasses nor soda-water.”
“Unlike some of your Hindu gods, Mr. Jaganathan, he would appear to have only two hands.”
“Now, Mr. Crabbe, pardon me one moment.” He put the naked child down on the floor. It crawled over to Crabbe and began to dribble on to his sandals. Jaganathan opened the brief-case and extracted a brochure with a red cover. Crabbe’s heart turned over as the past came hurtling back. It was a copy of Vista, the undergraduate magazine to which he himself had in fact often contributed, had, for one year, edited. How strange that here, eight thousand miles and a whole life away, part of one’s past should be recorded, waiting to spring out at one in a Tamil house full of bawling children, hens clucking outside, the fat black sweating hand holding it out. How very strange.
“Look at it, Mr. Crabbe, and decide whether this is not evidence. And not this only. There are other issues in which you have written on this same topic.”
“This is a long, long time ago, Mr. Jaganathan.”
“It seems not long. It was in that year that I first came to teach at Haji Ali College. Look at it well, Mr. Crabbe.”
Crabbe looked at it well. His heart turned over again as he opened it at an article entitled ‘Stravinsky and the Tradition’. The name of the writer of the article … He breathed heavily, felt faint.
“You see, Mr. Crabbe. You have done very, very foolish thing.”
And here a poem by Hardman, a very bad poem. Crabbe saw a blur of print only before he steadied himself to look at it.
The one woman I long for,
Straight as an apple tree,
And in her voice all summer,
Bird and breeze and bee.
And then an article by Victor Crabbe, arrogant, ignorant, juvenile:
The deterministic principle that Marx took over from Hegel is often lost sight of by those who work for the cause. The class struggle is inevitable, an ineluctable part of the dialectical process, and the revolution, however slow its coming, nevertheless has to come. …
“And here, Mr. Crabbe, you talk of the Communist revolution in the East. You say that that is next important arena where standard of living is lowest in the world. You also say …”
“It was a long time ago,” said Crabbe faintly. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his left eye. “A very long time ago.”
“I see you are overcome by shame, Mr. Crabbe. For that reason I do not wish to be too hard. You have only to do as I say.”
“How little you understand,” said Crabbe. “That’s a dead world. That was another me. We all believed in it then. It was our new myth, our new hope. It was all very foolish.”
“Very foolish. And now you are beginning to see consequence of your foolishness.”
And she too, dark hair, blue jumper, sitting beside him on the floor, drinking tea, occasionally adding her voice to the discussion. Once, to the group, she had played records of Mossolov and Shostakovitch.
“Oh, God, man,” cried Crabbe, “it was wholesome, it was good, it was youth. It was right for us then. We wanted to improve the world. We honestly thought that we loved mankind. Perhaps we did. Oh, we found out that we’d been following a false god, but at the time it seemed the only religion for a man of any feeling or intelligence. Those articles represent a part of me that I’m not at all ashamed of. I wouldn’t retract them. They were true for that stage in my development. But they don’t represent me now.”
“You say you wouldn’t retract them, Mr. Crabbe?”
“Jaganathan, you’re a bloody fool. I’d be doing a great disservice to Malay if I got out and let you take over.”
“You will kindly not call me bloody fool in my own house, Mr. Crabbe.” Jaganathan shook. “Who are you to say I could not run this school? I was running this school when you were still writing your wicked articles about the necessity of Communist bandits in the East. While you were only a foolish young soldier I was running this school.”
“Were your masters pleased with you, Mr. Jaganathan?”
“They were pleased with me, Mr. Crabbe. They knew I was efficient and they said so often.”
“The Japanese prized efficiency, didn’t they? It’s no good, Jaganathan, you’ll never understand the feeling we had in those days. We were on fire, ready to fight anyone. I don’t think we could have done what you did. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. And now if the Communists took over here you’d just be the same. Anything for a bit of personal power. You make me sick.”
“Mr. Crabbe, I will not stand for such words in my house. You shall go now.”
“Oh, I’ll go. But if you want a fight, Jaganathan, you can bloody well have one. I can fight dirty too.”
“I will not fight. I will do my duty. I will have those articles typed in many copies and I will give them to the staff. And they will see what you are, and you will get no more co-operation from them. And I shall call a meeting of the parents and they shall know too. You will have only trouble now, Crabbe, nothing but trouble.”
Crabbe raised his eyebrows. This was the first time Jaganathan had ever addressed him without the conventional honorific. He grinned. “Kindly remember you are speaking to your headmaster, Mr. Jaganathan.”
“You will not be that for long.”
“Long enough, Mr. Jaganathan.” Crabbe picked his way delicately through a writhing pattern of children and reached the door. There the dog cursed him again. He cursed back this time. Startled, the dog retreated to the sugar-box which was its kennel. A black baby stared, sucking its thumb.
Crabbe, as he drove slowly back to his house, thought not of the declaration of war with Jaganathan, but of his own youth, disclosed so unexpectedly in those childish pages that smelt of the apple-loft. His heart jumped again with the shock of her memory leaping out at him from a pompous and ill-informed article. He saw her, smelt her, felt the dark curls above the white neck, held her. He hardly noticed the Jaguar drawing up on the other side of the palm-fringed road. It was Hardman, and with him was Father Laforgue. Both were solemn. The priest gave no greeting, staring straight ahead, holding something with care as if fearful of spilling it.
“I wanted to see you,” said Crabbe. “I’ve got a bloody big bone to pick.”
“Not now.” Hardman whispered. “This is serious.”
“This is serious, too. What the hell are you whispering for?”
“Be quiet. Can’t you see what he’s carrying? Where does Mahalingam live?”
“Mahalingam?”
“You know,” Hardman was impatient. “That teacher who’s ill. He’s dying now. He wants to make his peace. He sent for Georges.”
“Dying? Nobody told me; nobody tells me anything.”
“Quick. Where does he live?”
“In the new married quarters. Round by the water-works.”
“Take us there. Quick. There’s no time to lose.”
“Dying? Nobody ever told me.” Crabbe reversed his car on to a shallow dune at the road’s side, set his direction once more away from home. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?”
“He was. Hurry up. We may be too late.”
Crabbe had never met Mahalingam and he suddenly felt ashamed of the fact. He knew where he lived, for he addressed a monthly pay cheque to him. He did not even know what disease he was suffering from. That was bad. Bad headmastership. He sped down the main road, the Jaguar purring after him, turned right by a decayed coconut plantation, turned left by the water-works, at length came to a block of bright new buildings. Where Mahalingam lived, or was dying, was evident from a ghoulish knot of people standing outside an open door, waiting.
“I had better go in alone,” said Father Laforgue. He whispered too, aware that, despite the wide hot blue air and the noise of children, he carried with him the Eucharist, core and focus of a silence of worshippers. He went in, Malays stepping back awkwardly, half resentfully, half fearful of magic they did not know. The white padre was going to kill Mahalingam, but that, it seemed, was what Mahalingam wanted. The wife, sullen-eyed, followed Father Laforgue into the house.
“There’s going to be a hell of a row about this,” said Hardman, seated at his wheel. “I hope nobody’s going to talk too much. The authorities will come down on poor old Georges like a ton of bricks.”
“I’d no idea he was dying.” Crabbe was almost apologising to Hardman. Suddenly he changed his tone to the truculent, remembering other business. “What have you been saying to Jaganathan?”
“Saying? What do you mean? Who is Jaganathan?”
“You know damn well who Jaganathan is. You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you? About me.”
“Jaganathan? Is that your Tamil friend? Teacher at the school?”
“Oh, come off it. You know who he is. You’ve been telling him about my supposed Communist sympathies, haven’t you? There’s no point in denying it. What I want to know is, why? What in God’s name have you got against me?”
“Let’s get this straight, Victor. Who’s been telling you all this?”
“Jaganathan himself. He said there was somebody else present when you told him. What exactly have you been saying to him?”
“But, honestly, Victor, I just can’t think of a time when I ever spoke to the man. I don’t think I’ve even met him.” Hardman’s white face was screwed up in what looked like honest bewilderment.
“What have you got against me? That’s all I want to know. What harm have I ever done you?”
“But I don’t see when I could have met him. I’m genuinely trying to think back. …”
“Not after that business with Ah Wing? You won’t have to do much thinking back. I put it to you, as you lawyers say, that, for some reason best known to yourself, you got in touch with Jaganathan and informed him that I was sending food supplies to the Communists. Isn’t that it?”
“Good God, man.” Hardman looked shocked. “Do you honestly think I’d do that?”
“Well, what put the idea into his head? He’s even gone to the trouble of getting old copies of the university magazine from Singapore. He’s going to circulate some of the articles I wrote. He’s going to raise a very unpleasant kind of hell. And it’s you who started him off.”
“Oh, God,” said Hardman. “What a stupid thing. I remember now, I did meet him. I talked to him for about five minutes at the Istana. It was the Sultan’s birthday. I said there was no harm in intellectual Communism. I said that, in our day, most young men were theoretical Communists. I must have instanced you as an example. I probably said that even you had been an intellectual Communist.”
“Well, you’ve let me in for a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“But he can’t do anything. I mean, you wrote those articles ages ago, when people thought very differently …”
“I wish to God you’d keep your big mouth shut in future. Don’t you see, people here aren’t going to think in terms of phases. As far as they’re concerned, what I believed when I was twenty I still believe. Time stands still in the East. They’ve got a lovely stick to beat another white oppressor with now. I suppose that’s what you want. You told me yourself you’re no longer a white man.”
“Look here, Victor, have a bit of sense. Nobody can do anything. The people in Government would just laugh. So would the police, for that matter.”
“I know, I know. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have trouble here. God knows it’s hard enough to do this job, without strikes and broken windows and slashed tyres and, probably, axes. Don’t you see what you’ve done, you bloody idiot? You’ve just about ruined my career.”
“Oh, come, that’s going a bit far …”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me out of the way. You don’t want me here laughing at the bloody mess you’ve made of your own career. That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want faces out of the past …”
“Look here, you’re talking sheer damned nonsense. …”
Father Laforgue came to the door, stern, rebuking them with an upheld finger. They became aware also that the Malays, mild, interested, concerned, were watching, their mouths open.
“This is just a little undignified, isn’t it?” said Hardman. “Rowing when there’s a death going on in there. If you want to talk to me please come to my office. I don’t like brawling in the streets.”
“Oh, go to …” Crabbe shut his mouth on the obscenity, got into his car, started it viciously, and drove off, thinking: ‘Three quarrels in twelve hours. It isn’t right, it isn’t like me; the tropics are getting me down; but I didn’t start it all. What gets into other people?’ Hardman, colour in his cheeks, lit a cigarette, trembled doing it, waited, watching the Abelard corner clumsily. When Father Laforgue came out he looked pleased.
“I think it is quite possible he will recover. Extreme Unction often restores health. I often saw it in China. It is like a medicine.”
“Yes.” Hardman put the car into gear, drove away slowly.
“I think these people will be quiet about it. The wife was impressed, in spite of herself. They were quite amazed when he cheered up so visibly.”
“Really?”
“One could make many converts here. I am sure of that. But Islam is so repressive. There is no freedom of conscience. It is very like Calvinism.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Drop me outside the town. I can pick up a trishaw. We must not be seen together. We do not want any trouble.”
“No.”
“What is the matter with you, Rupert? You are not saying very much.” Father Laforgue chuckled. “I think I understand. I think you have had an embarrassing experience.”
“Oh?”
“It is not easy to throw things over, just like that. You still believe, you see. It was like meeting a woman you think you no longer love. But your heart beats fast, just the same. And your mouth becomes very dry. I know nothing of such experiences, but I can well imagine what it is like. I am happier than you are, much happier. You can drop me here.”
Father Laforgue stood by the roadside, vainly waiting for a trishaw to cruise by. But it was the Sabbath, and most men were going to the mosque. Hardman drove home, hearing several times on his way the thin wail of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.