PHILIPPA AND Daud began dovetailing, interlocking their lives into each other’s. It did not disrupt Daud’s life too much. He lived alone and had no family in Singapore. And few Malay friends. “These Singapura Malays are so different,” he had said to Philippa. She was about to add, “Those in the town, you mean,” but had held back.
One morning, in the toilet, the thought suddenly came to her that she was unconsciously suppressing herself when she was with Daud. She did not cut into his talking as often as she did with Vicky. Because I’m hanging on to his words, she told herself. She did not consider whether it was because she did not want to annoy him in any way, although she knew the many compromises she had made for Daud.
One of these was not drinking when she was with him. She would have loved to sit at the S.R.C. bar while he talked of his past in Malacca, his mother, his family, his work, his ideas, his music, sipping a cold B.G.A., smoking a cigarette, but she had decided to fit in with the ways of Daud’s life. She could not see she was giving more than taking. Her body, her whole self.
She had taken stances with the old stone-hardness which had put off many admirers in her past.
“Wow! You getting a flat of your own, Phillie. Great! No more mosquito bites, eh?”
“No, Daud.” His face changed. “I have to be careful. I’m a teacher, you know …” It didn’t sound convincing even to her. She stopped herself from adding I’ve got family here. No decent Eurasian girl would entertain a man in her flat for hours on end. Even if she were engaged to him.
“But I gotta see it. Buildings, houses especially, restrict or enhance our lives. I jus’ gotta see what is going to shape your body …”
“My body? You’re crazy!”
“I mean the physical things. Which affect other things.”
“I see …”
“You know, that’s why I told you so much about the room I rent and my landlady.”
Living alone again. Like before the war. Before Pa and Ma and the whole family moved down as the war hotted up, bringing Malacca with them, descending on her and enfolding her in Singapore. But now in more comfort. And truly independent.
And that wonderful break, Duncan pulling strings to get her a telephone. For the White Y’s sake?
“I mean to say, Daud … that you cannot stay overnight. I mean … But, tell you what, I would love to have your ideas on how to furnish the flat. Do it up, when I have the cash and all that.”
Daud was a dream. He was mesmerised with her. She did not yield to him because he was a master, a towering force, a lion like Granpa. His whole life was now influenced by her. He did not ask for what she gave. She was burning with passion, with fires in her bloodstream that could only be stilled by surrender of her whole soul to Daud. All the strengths of her education and her discipline were channelled into the overpowering desire to almost immolate herself to him.
“Why are you so secretive, Philippa?”
“Secretive?”
“Secretive about us. I know we cannot flaunt the, the …”
“Cut across society’s morals?”
“Yah. Yah. The dirt will be on us if I keep going to your flat night after night. Till late. But there’s no need to avoid places where the Malays or Seranis go. Is there? It’s not as though we are married people having a dirty little whirligig?”
“But we are crossing taboo boundary lines, Daud, aren’t we?”
“Look at it this way,” he paused for a painful interval. “If you were going out; I mean walking out together in the decent Jane Austen sense, with an orang puteh, a white man, there would be titterings among the aunties and uncles. And years later they would say … what a fine couple they were. What a gentleman he was. How they loved each other. And, by God, old chap, he respected her. He’s truly white. Wouldn’t that be a Kiplingesque ideal? Romantic ideal?”
“Kiss me, darling.”
Going out with a white man. With Duncan. Openly, in his society. They had settled down to dining at the Officers’ Club at Beach Road. She knew the army men would be talking about Duncan and that blonde with strangely high cheekbones. A touch of the old brush. Not tar. Chinese brush, perhaps. Did he mind what they said or was he playing their cover role all the way?
Duncan. Big, square, with his hairy arms. He had kissed her on the cheek on their second or third meeting. Like an uncle would. And had continued the ritual every time they met. Ma had told her that was what the Portuguese do. A clear pattern of their dinners and brief meetings was forming. He was crisp and exact delivering information. He responded to Keh’s requests with machine-efficiency. Not like Daud’s indecisive hesitations.
“I can’t get that by Friday, Philippa.” The ‘Philippa’ treacle-smothered sometimes. Or “Right! Ring you tomorrow.” His eyes showing his pleasure at being able to deliver.
He never told her she was beautiful as Daud and Vicky did.
“Oh, that dress really suits you, Philippa.”
“A new lipstick?”
“Your hair’s different today, isn’t it?”
Just different words. The force of Duncan was like the huge mass of a grey buffalo, a mountain moving, coming at you through the paddy, stirring the confined water within the earth bunds as grey as its lumps of hard flesh, into swirls of bund-bounced widening, interfering rings, echoes of their own fluid ripplings, moving forward slowly, deliberately, heavily.
Unlike the predictable rhythmic surf of seas endlessly beating on beaches, hissing, whispering in her ear, reassuring, as she hugged her bolster in bed in her Malacca home. Daud’s home too.
Daud.
One night Duncan was talking about Debussy. She had told him she played the piano. He raced down paths of his own, but reined himself in quickly as he read the glaze of her eyes.
At their third or fourth dinner meeting it was raining when she walked into the Officers’ Club with a black oilskin raincoat and a brown waxed-paper umbrella.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed on seeing her. “Are you wet?”
“Dry, but hot and perspiring inside. Where can I leave these?”
“I’ll take them. I must say you look jolly good in black.”
“Thank you. You got X-ray eyes, eh?”
He looked confused. Philippa grinned widely as she took off the raincoat. She wore an informal black dress.
He laughed. “I see … I am doubly right. Black does suit you.”
“Goes with all blondes, Duncan.”
They sat in a bar, an anteroom to the restaurant. “Is it a long way from the bus-stop to the club?”
“I walked.”
“Not from school?”
“No. I had time to change today. At home.”
“You live near here? You’ve moved? Come to think of it, when I got those telephone papers I didn’t look at the address.”
“Yah. I’ve got a flat now in Wilkie Road.”
“That’s quite a walk from here.”
“Not for us country girls.”
“Ha ha ha. Don’t give me that, my slick-as-the-city friend.”
“Town.”
“At home Singapore would be considered a city …”
“Were you brought up in a city?”
“No. But I came from a ‘city’. Welwyn Garden City.”
“Garden city?”
“Yes. An interesting place. It was designed, planned as a garden city, meaning lots of green between the bricks and asphalt. By a fellow called Ebeneezer Howard. A new concept in town planning. The main spine road, for example, is called Parkway. Like a park with its wide central strip dividing the two carriageways. You must see it. Perhaps I’ll take you there one day?”
He looked into her eyes and paused. She saw a strange dreamy look in them.
“It’s funny, in a way. Welwyn Garden City is really not a city. There’s nothing of the bustling business in the town centre. It’s funny coming from a town which is not yet a city to Singapore which I think is really a city but not yet called one.”
She was thinking how interested Daud would be in the garden city idea. His city.
“And you’re from Malacca. The sleepy hollow, I’ve heard it called. Maligning it, I suppose.”
Philippa smiled, “No. It is a lovely sleepy place.”
“Tell me about Malacca, Philippa.”
She read plainly: tell me about you. She told him. Through her gin merah (pink gin) and through the wonderful oxtail soup the club served, distracted in between by her enjoyment of the hot crisp-crusted rolls she hadn’t tasted for years.
“Sounds like a place mother and father would have dreamt of?”
She thought he referred to his parents so coldly. The butter was absolutely delicious.
“A place of palm trees, tropical fragrances, guitars strumming and love,” he continued into her silence.
“Yah. Guitars and music. Some of the fellows were very good.”
“At the guitar?”
The waiter brought her pork chops and his solid steak.
“And all that passionate young love sloshing around in those days?” And casting his line into deeper water, “With you in the centre of it all?”
Daud’s similar probing last week came to her in a rush. “God, Phil, you must have been the gold at the end of every Serani buck’s rainbow. You must have been ravishing beautiful. The dream. Allah’s gift to Malacca men. Hell, why didn’t I hear about it! About you. I would have fallen like a ton of bricks instantly.” She had teased him in his terminology which she was learning fast, “Common bricks or facing bricks, my love?”
“Yes, I’ll have a glass of red.”
“Like our visions of Hawaii, but in sarongs?”
“Not quite. Village morals. Both Roman Catholic and Muslim.”
“I meant pure love, not …”
Philippa waited to chew up and swallow the heavenly pork and green peas and onions before she replied, watching Duncan holding his wine glass in front of his face, under his expectant eyes.
Her tone was serious, but warm and friendly, “My past … your past … it’s nice to talk about our young days … and we both learn a lot about the other worlds … you must tell me more about England, your folks, your school … it’s all what I’ve read about … but it’s wonderful to have a real live Englishman to talk to …”
“Not all English, some Scots.”
“… all I know about the Scottish is porridge …”
“Of course, oats … sowing wild oats …”
“Still, these days?” They laughed with their exchanges.
“As I was saying … to have a real live person from the culture of my education to talk to. You don’t know what it means to me …”
“And if I were Portuguese?”
“My grandfather would love you. But not my father … but as I was saying …”
“You were saying?”
“Apart from my fascination about you …”
“Fascination?” his eyebrows raised, histrionically.
“Interest … we can work better together on this White Y thing if we know each other.”
“Speech! Hear, hear!”
“And as I said just now, learning about different worlds …”
“You did?”
“Yah. Not in so many words.”
Philippa stumbled on, “… but … er, er … pasts of our hearts, even puppy loves, don’t help.”
“They divide people? They will push wedges between us?” he thrust.
“Jealousy … in a way. Jealousy only arises where there is a crack, the tiniest chink of doubt …” Philippa stopped. The thoughts moving around in her head were elusive.
Duncan looked at her. She thought, he’s going to smile and say something terribly clever or terribly philosophical.
He was not like Daud. Duncan did not put his head down and charge. He was like the seladang in the jungle. He moved heavily, deliberately, like the water buffalo. As old Uncle Nonis used to say in his clumsy mixture of English, Malay and Portuguese, the goat is hasty, capricious, volatile, but the stupid, servile water buffalo, with his head always down, broods, thinks and moves with the momentum of his weight that is as unstoppable as a rampant elephant.
But she believed Duncan had got her veiled message.
He offered to drive her back to her flat in his jeep for the first time that night. It was still drizzling a fine amorphous rain. She had wondered before why he hadn’t sent her back to her old place at St Michael’s Road and put it down to his overdone caution, his not wanting to appear too forward.
“Up there,” she pointed when the jeep stopped in Niven Road, at the Wilkie Road corner, in front of the flats. “First floor.”
He bent across her, his body almost touching hers, with an “excuse me”, to look from under the jeep’s canvas roof.
“Moon and star on top?”
“Yah. It used to be called the Moon Star flats.”
“Whee … just the place to have a romantic postprandial drink.”
Philippa smiled her best smile.
“Not tonight, Duncan,” she said softly with her hand on his arm. The hair on it was a surprise. Like Sundram’s. And she followed her denial at once with a spirited, “Hey, you like cockles?”
“I certainly do! Cockles and mussels, alive, alive O!”
“Then the next time I’ll take you to a rough and ready streetside stall for a dinner of cockles. Kerang, we call them in Malay. Washed down with beer, of course. Have you tried them here?”
“No.”
“Well, my treat next time.” And cutting off any reply from him, “Goodnight, Duncan. Thanks for the lovely dinner. Ta-ta.”
Philippa swung her legs round and was standing on the street and walking away before he could do his kiss-on-the-cheek ritual. But she turned her head when she heard the engine start. He was looking at her. He blew her a kiss. She raised her hand in the air as though catching a high-flying, boundary-bound cricket ball, closed her fist around it and thrust her hand into the pocket of her black oilskin raincoat. She saw him toss back his head in silhouette against the street lamp and his mouth open in a laugh. The engine roared with his excitement and he was gone.
She was pensive when she met Daud the next night. It was a beautiful clear night for wet February and he lifted her high, high above heavens she had never known before.
Maybe it was the heavy soup kambing with goat’s brains they had had together near the Arab Street mosque in an unforgettable closeness afterwards that cloyed to her insides and kept her awake with her mind out of control. But in between the rankling regret of her slapping the little terror, Kim Thye, in the classroom that morning, reliving the ecstasy of her flesh and blood soaring with Daud, the completely irrelevant memory of Emily Street’s vivid description of the waterspout she saw over the sea off Penang, sucking up the whole ocean into its grey cone-shaped belly, swirling, like an animal amok, spinning, gripping her rigid, open-mouthed with horror and wonder, and Duncan’s two-edged thrusts at the Officers’ Club the night before, it suddenly struck her that Daud and Duncan were two worlds apart impinging on her from different directions. She giggled into her pillow.
Antonio had said that day, where are our Eurasian boys? I have them. Only in different, separate pockets.
“SWEETIE,” VICKY paused. Philippa waited. Vicky did not hesitate unless it was for effect.
“You’ve been holding back on me.”
“Oh, Vicky, what’s it this time?”
“You’re glowing. You’re in love. I’ll put my last dollar on that.”
Philippa flushed with the embarrassment of the compliment and her surprise at Vicky’s statement.
“Oh-my-God! You blushed!”
“Haven’t we been through this once before?” Philippa asked.
Vicky slapped her thigh, utterly pleased with herself.
“It’s a long time since you said nice things like that to me, Vicky.”
“Huh. Don’t try to pussyfoot with me, Phil. I know you too well.”
Philippa smiled her blandest smile.
“He’s a handsome devil … from what I saw in the dark of the cinema hall. But I know you. That’s not enough for you. What’s up?”
“Vicky, I’m confused. I …”
“Hit you in the guts, eh?”
“There’s more … but … tell you one day. Not tonight.”
Vicky looked hard at her. She saw the twisting of Philippa’s inner feelings. She remembered how she had laughed and cruelly ridiculed her brother the first time he had tried to restring his guitar and in his nervous fumbling had got the E and F strings twisted.
She slid across the sofa, put her hand on Philippa’s shoulder and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“Vicky knows … I still love you, sweetie.”