NEXT DAY a long dark bluish green-grey edge lifted on the horizon on the east: the coast of Java. Turning northwards, the convoy crept along it. Aboard ship, the tension grew; A.R.P. exercises intensified, but the sky sweltered grey and unbroken over them. Next day they passed through the straits between Java and Sumatra, and for the first time they saw aeroplanes. Out of the east they came, marked with reassuring red, white and blue markings, sturdy, flying low with an oddly old-fashioned fussiness.
‘Christ!’ said Alan’s friend, the ship’s officer. ‘Buffaloes! Would you believe it! I thought they’d all been put painlessly to sleep years ago. Why, they can fly all of a hundred miles an hour if pushed. Let us cross our fingers, and pray.’
But they saw no Japanese planes, and they reached Singapore unmolested, at night and in heavy rain; in the dark wet, the docks might have been anywhere in the world, nor was there much sign of air raid damage about. Orderly and subdued, the battalion disembarked, and entrained immediately for a destination as usual unrevealed.
As Alan stood by his carriage door, waiting for the train to leave with all his men satisfactorily disposed, a woman in a light mackintosh came up to him, bearing gifts. It was an odd shock to see a European woman, a civilian, there. Gratefully he accepted a packet of cigarettes, but it made him uneasy to think of women and presumably children still living in Singapore. She was shouting something up to him against the escaping roar of steam; her face was turned upwards, shining pale and wet, with something touchingly forlorn and mysterious in the dark; a strand of hair strayed on her temples from under the hood of her coat.
‘What?’ he shouted, stooping to her.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she shouted. Her breath came up to him, saturated with gin as the air was with rain.
‘Oh,’ he said.
The train moved out. It went slowly, hesitantly, stopping frequently, sometimes for air raid alarms, sometimes just stopping. Towards dawn Alan fell asleep, to awake apparently the next moment with a jerk. The train was stationary, and for the moment of waking he was convinced it had been ambushed; it stood in a deep narrow cutting in bright sunlight. High on each side, solid, green with a vivid green as glittering as snakes, rose what he took to be the famous jungle, sheer from the red-banked earth. He climbed down to the track. The train lay along the lines, vulnerable as a broken-backed caterpillar; the wall of leaves glittered as with a million hidden eyes. He was close to the head of the train; by the locomotive, a railway official was arguing with the dismounted Malay driver.
‘He says it is dangerous to go farther. Many drivers have been killed. He is frightened.’
That the driver was frightened was obvious; his dark eyes seemed to be trying to see all ways at once, even out of the back of his head. His dark head shook as the official said that he must go on. His hands wiped themselves ceaselessly on an oily piece of rag. No. He was not going on. He was frightened.
Holl came leaping up. ‘Of course he’s going on,’ he said.
‘But,’ said the official, ‘I don’t see what more we can do. He will be dismissed, of course, but he says he does not care – ’
‘You forget,’ said Holl, gaily, ‘there’s a war on.’ He pulled out his revolver, and looked at the driver with an eye of benevolent murder. ‘Uppety!’ he said, beckoning with the barrel. ‘You mustn’t be frightened; you’ll be all right. Uncle Sam is coming with you.’
The man opened his mouth to scream, and Holl wrapped an arm swiftly but tenderly about his face, motioning upwards with the gun. ‘Giddy-up,’ he said. ‘There’s a good lad. I’ve always wanted to be an engine driver.’
The train proceeded towards its destination, which was, as Scrapings duly announced at a conference in his carriage, the town of Malacca, some hundred and fifty miles north-west of Singapore, on the west coast, and over a hundred miles south of any fighting so far. The battalion sorted itself out in its quarters, based on a school building by a fairly large open area beyond the outskirts of the town. The first day, Alan spent in discouragement with his platoon; they had by now got his wireless drill word- and knob-perfect, but once the sets were turned on, and the voices came out of them at the men out of nothing, they forgot everything and turned every knob with the abandon of an amateur organist improvising and pulling every stop in sight. Alan, who could only be with one set at a time, went almost berserk until he had closed them into a manageable ring, but by then they were bored and stupid. He returned dispirited, to find Sundar Singh fiddling with his kit.
His orderly announced that B Echelon, which had been making its separate way from Singapore by road, had arrived. He seemed thoughtful. At length he said, in a swift rush, that B Echelon had passed many other road convoys, all going in the opposite direction. They had even, in a railway siding near a town, seen a hospital train; it had been machine gunned, they said, from the air. They also said that the Japanese had tanks. Have we got tanks, sahib?
Of course we have tanks. Alan was taken by surprise. The tanks were no doubt being held in reserve, he said.
And aeroplanes? They said the sky ‘up there’ was thick with aeroplanes, but none of them were ours.
‘You saw the fine aeroplanes over the ship when we sailed into Singapore. Those were ours.’
‘Yes, sahib.’
‘Well?’
Sundar Singh was still uneasy. ‘They say, sahib, the Japanese take no prisoners.’ With an odd furtive look around him, he gestured vividly as one having his throat cut.
Alan looked at his orderly. The brown liquid eyes looked back at him with the question. Alan turned his face away, and directed it to the wall; he felt it set in sad, stern, mortuary lines.
‘It may be,’ he said to the wall, ‘that the Japanese are a barbarous, uncivilised – ’ His statement became too theoretical for his Urdu to cope with; what was the Urdu for uncivilised? He felt very uneven, and exasperated. In a hard cold voice, he said: ‘It need not concern us, Sundar Singh. If they do that, there is no reason why we should not do that too.’
With large, wondering eyes, his orderly looked at him.
‘And, of course, we shall not be taken prisoners.’
His orderly said nothing, but looked.
Alan turned away and said masterfully: ‘Now I have to attend a conference. Is there a clean shirt?’
‘Yes, sahib. There is a clean shirt.’
The conference dealt with routine matters. Scrapings was fresh from another conference at Brigade Headquarters. The brigade was disposed thus and thus; routine training would continue, and the fighting companies must take every advantage of this respite to get used to working in rubber and in jungle; but he had to remind his officers that all ranks must be continuously on the alert. One company, with transport, was always to be ready to go out at a moment’s notice to deal with any alarm. The Japanese were believed to have no transport vessels on this coast – indeed, how could they, seeing that they had attacked on the other coast and had no access by sea to this side? – while certain areas were mined, and the whole patrolled by the Navy, but there always remained the possibility of small infiltrations by night in native craft. Any such would be mopped up forthwith. On land, added Scrapings, Japanese troops were certainly infiltrating in extremely unorthodox fashions like (he quoted the G.O.C. Malaya) gangsters. On bicycles, for example, in civilian dress. Any such bicyclists encountered would be shot on sight. He spoke on…
It was really, Alan decided privately, a myth. Out of the window he could see palm trees that drooped elegantly across an evening sky where colour ran and fused in a most carefully contrived sunset. It was all a myth.
Scrapings had arrived at a pause. Then he said, heavily: ‘It has been proved, I regret to report, in the course of this campaign that the Japanese do not take prisoners.’ He paused again. His grey moustaches twitched. ‘It would be unjust to our men to conceal this from them, but’ – his voice dropped – ‘this… this perverse information may also bolster our own morale, our own determination. I think you should make it clear to your men that – there is, of course, no official directive possible on this point – but you should make it plain to your men that what the Japanese can do, we can do too. Gentlemen, two can play at any game.’
His audience received this in silence. Alan looked round at the sad faces, and felt himself very sad too. Yet at the same time his mind bridled, and irresponsibly he almost neighed: Except certain kinds of patience. But at the same time he heard the echo of his own voice saying likewise, in almost the same words, to his orderly and across it an unheeded dribble of thought like a ticker tape: This is not reasonable; this is not civilised; there is no reason to panic… None of these messages cohered into audible words, and his face remained mutely sad.
Scrapings asked for questions.
Holl signalled. He had many questions. To begin with, for his own company at least, he wished to ask for an immediate issue of gym shoes; the army boot, he said, could be heard coming a mile off in jungle or rubber, and it was also difficult to climb trees in boots.
‘Climb trees?’ said Scrapings, with a hint of exasperation.
Holl said that it was obvious that one had to take every advantage that the terrain afforded. There were a remarkable number of trees – ideal, for example, for sniping.
‘Ex-cellent point, Holl,’ said Scrapings. Malacca would be rifled of gym shoes the next day. Holl continued with his queries.
Next morning Alan was sent downtown with a truck and the quartermaster to shop for gym shoes. An air raid warning coincided with his arrival, and the truck was brought to a halt by what felt like the whole of Asia evacuating from the town. Alan parked the truck under a tree, and sat down to wait. One plane went over very high, too high to distinguish its breed, and nothing happened except a fragmentary shower of paper. Alan collected a few, but they were all in Malay or Chinese. Then Sundar Singh came up with one that showed a British officer crouching under shelter while Indian troops fought despairingly in front.
Sundar Singh asked what it was.
Alan explained that the British officer was himself, while Sundar Singh was one of the Indian troops.
With his mouth open, Sundar Singh looked at the crude drawing. When he had worked it out, he turned his eyes, worried, on Alan, who explained it again.
Sundar Singh had a brainwave. He pointed to the men fighting. ‘You, sahib,’ he said, ‘there. And me here.’ He pointed to the man in shelter, and giggled.
‘O.K.,’ said Alan. ‘But when you’ve finished cleaning my shoes there, you come out and help me fighting in front.’
Sundar Singh agreed to this, and took the pamphlet off to explain to his colleagues.
This was the first Japanese plane they had seen.
After a while the residents of the town began to seep back, and soon the shops were open again, and Alan went about commandeering, against universal protest, such stocks of rubber shoes as he could find. Storekeepers were reluctant to believe that his signature would be redeemable against money, and he felt that he was probably missing large concealed stores; such shoes as there were would be, he guessed, too small for most of his large-footed troops.
In the afternoon he turned to his platoon again, who were still hopelessly embroiled in the delicate mysteries of wireless communication. Suddenly, just before they had to stop for the day, everybody got the hang of it almost simultaneously. In a state almost of exaltation, with rapt expressions, they walked about chanting harshly across the air from one set to another. Scrapings appeared while they were doing this, and was moved to praise Alan; it was the first time he had spoken to, rather than at, Alan since the incident on board ship.
‘Invaluable,’ he said. ‘May well be vital. And what range will we work at?’
Alan said that with luck the range would cover any normal dispersal that a battalion might expect, but that working in rubber might somewhat reduce the efficiency of the sets; that he would have to try it out the next day. Accordingly, he set forth next morning to a big rubber plantation, where he disposed his sets. They switched on. Not a signal came through. After checking for faults and finding none, Alan moved the sets closer. As the morning wore on, and the green gloom lightened beneath the climbing sun, he at last established contact at between a hundred and two hundred yards. His men, triumphant again, smiled across at him, as they said Ack Company to Don Company over, and understood nothing of the implications.
Straightening up, Alan found himself looking into the eyes of his havildar. Then he looked away, and all around him the trees stretched away like an ordered maze of bars under the roof-thick leaves. Visibility, he reckoned, was just about the range of his wireless sets. Then he felt the trees like a hostile cordon ringed about them; his signallers, aware at last that something was wrong, fell silent. Wildly, he looked around him, as the threat behind each tree trunk seemed to move. He forced himself to look back at his havildar.
‘Ultimately,’ he said. ‘In the end, they are no good. I am sorry.’
Expressionless, the havildar looked at him. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘we still have the field telephones, the flags.’
‘In the end,’ said Alan, ‘we have our good thick legs, and our loud voices.’
The havildar grinned suddenly, and glanced with a derisive hawk at the sets, intimating that he had never thought, himself, that this new-fangled trash could work anyhow.
‘O.K., havildar sahib. Now all we’ve got to do is find the bloody trucks and we can all go home.’
As they were piling into their trucks, Scrapings came alongside in a station wagon. Alan broke the news to him, and his commanding officer went purple, controlling himself with obvious difficulty. After a little wordless bubbling, he said: ‘We’ll have a word about this later, Mart.’ Not in front of the men, his bleak eye said, eloquent with contempt. ‘In the meantime, we must try to work out other methods of communication; it’s a major problem, when we’re likely to be operating in small detachments at long range. Mustn’t we, Mart?’ Well, said his eye, go on, Mart; think of something.
‘Drums, sir,’ said Alan fiercely. ‘We might be able to work something out with native drums.’
The glaring eyes popped, and blinked rapidly. Then they glazed with a wary caution. Alan saw Scrapings’ gaze wander and tangle in angry lost bewilderment amongst the endless trees, and, recognising the feeling, his own anger vanished as suddenly he felt the full weight of responsibility on those elderly thin shoulders.
‘We’ll think of something, sir,’ he said gently but confidently.
Later that day, a message reached him from the C.O. He was to proceed at once into Malacca again, and corner all native drums that might be available.
In the Mess that evening, as they ate hurriedly in between business, the officers were preoccupied. Rumours of a major engagement were coming through from the Slim River position. Holl came in late, sweating and weary, and plumped down silent at Alan’s side.
After a while he said: ‘They don’t like it, you know. All those bloody trees moving around them all the time. They keep on looking over their shoulders as if something was going to jump on ’em from behind.’
Alan told him about the wireless sets, and, when he had finished eating, took him and showed him his hoard of drums. Holl looked at them blearily.
‘You’re a bloody fool, aren’t you, Alan?’
‘Yes.’
Holl stared at him, and then, bored, thought of other things. ‘I’ve done for today. Maybe we ought to go and paint Malacca red. Last chance we’ll get, I should say.’
‘I’m not painting anything red with you. Not even a pillar box.’
But Holl was suddenly illuminated by the idea of pleasure and of city lights; he swept Alan off almost physically to the adjutant. The adjutant agreed with Alan, and besought Holl to be reasonable, but in the middle of his pleadings Scrapings appeared. To him, Holl appealed directly.
Scrapings thought; he seemed to be working up to an explosion, and Alan could feel the reminder coming that they were still technically under open arrest, when Scrapings’ eye fell on the adjutant, and softened. ‘Bill,’ he said, ‘you’ve been on the job twenty hours a day for five days solid now. It’s time you had a break; you go with them. Holl; Mart. No nonsense. No whisky. Understand? No trouble.’
With a somewhat indignant adjutant aboard, Alan and Holl drove through the lampless dark; on their right was the sea, calm and silver under the moon, remote as peace beyond the black inclination of the palm trees. Briefly, as the truck floated past, Alan doted on this remoteness; he would have liked to stop, to brood over it, to strip and swim in it; it would, he was thinking confusedly, be cleaning, it might even be Lethe. But he was already following Holl into the dimly lighted smoky confusion of a dance hall; as they came in the band faltered, and the people’s heads turned in the thick light to look. The officers sat at a table, and drank warm fizzy beer, while everyone looked at them. To Alan their eyes, their expressions, were inscrutable; he knew only that he was intruding. But Holl, impervious to stares, was studying form. Having studied, he made his choice, and rose. With a thin dark Chinese taxi-girl in red trousers, he danced, working vigorously about her like a village dancer round a maypole. The stares seemed to become less concentrated, but Alan could still sense, almost as palpable as the smoke-fog, the continuing impassive curiosity about him; they were, he thought, as bad as the trees in the rubber plantations; waiting, watching.
Holl came back, sweating. She was, he said, a good girl, but dear. Twenty-five cents a dance. He drank a lot of beer. Alan, who had been contemplating with interest one girl who was taller than the rest, and with more flesh, rose to dance. In his arms, she was less substantial than she had looked, and flat as a board.
Her name, she said, smiling brilliantly, was Susie. Her mouth opened and shone over teeth; her eyes shone over nothing, shallow and troubling, and in them he saw his own face.
‘But your Chinese name?’
She was indignant. She was not Chinese; she was British.
Conversation flagged. Alan rested his cheek on her hair, and she was still more indignant. They danced, mechanically, distantly, to Begin the Beguine. When Alan returned to his table, twenty-five cents the poorer, he found Holl alone. A message had come for the adjutant; the brigadier was on his way over. ‘Not a flap,’ said Holl, yawning. ‘They don’t want us. I’ve promised to keep off the whisky. Also I promised for you, you dangerous drunk.’ He swirled a glassful of a pale liquid of a dubious yellow-amber tinge.
‘What’s that?’ said Alan.
‘They say,’ said Holl, ‘that it’s whisky. But they know bloody well, and I know bloody well, that it’s nothing of the sort, so that’s all right, isn’t it?’
Alan sipped at Holl’s glass, and spat hurriedly. ‘You damn’ fool!’
‘Yes,’ said Holl. ‘But only just this one. It’s a crying scandal. Someone’s got to try it so’s to warn the troops off it. Go blind, I dare say.’ He tutted briskly, whistled, took another sip and sucked at his teeth. ‘Some alcoholic content, at any rate. That’s what makes it so dangerous for young inexperienced drinkers.’ He drained it and advanced with a gorilla-like stance upon the floor. Alan did not dance any more, but sat like a watchdog over Holl’s glass, and Holl began to get sour. Eventually, he had an argument with one of his partners, and came flouncing back in disgust.
‘Bloody nonsense!’ he growled as he sat down. Almost immediately he stood up again. ‘I know a whore when I see one,’ he said. ‘Just you wait here, laddie. I’ve a complaint to lodge with the management.’ He shook off Alan’s restraining hand. ‘Don’t be so boring, boy. I’m all right; in full possession of all my senses. Too full. I want service. I’ll be right back.’
‘What on earth…?’ But Holl had gone. He was talking to a smoothly rounded Chinese in a tuxedo; this was presumably the manager and he began by looking very insulted. Then Alan saw him smile, and then with a quick gesture he opened a door behind him and he and Holl had vanished through it, before Alan had done more than stiffen with apprehension.
Uneasily, Alan twitched and sat, and watched the door. Unconsciously, his hand groped for and found his revolver butt; it rested there. Holl seemed to be away hours, and Alan was just working out how to rush the door that Holl had gone through when it opened and he reappeared. He was cheerful.
‘Come on,’ he said, beckoning. ‘We’re off. I’ve got a hot tip.’
Holl drove, refusing to explain any further; he probed cautiously out of town, but not in the direction of the camp.
‘If you don’t tell me where we’re going,’ said Alan, seriously worried at last, ‘I’m getting out and I’ll walk home.’
Holl laid a finger on the side of his nose, and leered appallingly in the moonlight. A strong reek came on his breath.
‘Holl, what did you drink with that Chinese?’
‘That pimp,’ said Holl, ‘has in’s office bottles and bottles – but bottles of only the best Scotch, the true life-blood. Much as I should have liked to’ve refused, in view of maintaining desir’ble amic’l r’lationships with the native population, I could not. Could I?’
‘Oh God!’ said Alan. ‘Come on. Switch over. I’ll drive you back to camp.’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ said Holl, swatting Alan’s hand off the wheel. ‘’V’an urgent appointment. Besides, we can’t turn here; be reasonable.’ Nor could they turn: the truck was crawling now along a narrow track, scarcely wider than itself, with trees and thick undergrowth solid on the one side, and on the other the dark, glinting, stagnant water of the irrigation canal, the parit.
‘As soon as we can turn, we turn,’ said Alan, but with a sinking resignation of despair. He began to think, without much confidence, of ways and means of knocking Holl out without maiming him seriously.
The track seemed to go on for ever.
‘You know we’re already under open arrest.’
‘Why, so we are!’ said Holl, swerving dangerously. ‘Well, isn’t that nice. To know someone’s looking after us; someone cares.’
The track had suddenly widened; Holl brought the truck slowly and majestically round in a half-circle to stop in the middle of a clearing. On one side the track continued, edged with the cold glint of the parit. Opposite was a row of low palm-thatched Chinese houses, bleached by the moon and shuttered tight against it. They looked fragile and shallow as a stage set, with the arching top-tufted palms splayed behind their roofs. Beyond them, the track narrowed to a mere path along the parit amongst clumps of bananas with ragged drooping leaves like banners of a broken army.
Holl switched the engine off. The two men sat there, and the silent moonlight was taut as a flood, calm yet known to be swelling, along the top of a dyke. Nothing moved, but the shadows by the houses and under the trees seemed inhabited, though the houses themselves were dead behind their blank faces.
‘House on the far left, I think,’ said Holl, in a confidential calculating whisper. ‘Rum job. Very rum job. Not where I’d expect a lux-yourious high-class knocking shop… Just do a recce.’ He swung down from the truck, and was over by the houses before Alan had taken in what he had said. Suddenly he realised that Holl was after a brothel. For the first time since they had left Bombay Alan laughed, but the shadows seemed to stir angrily, and an indignant hiss from Holl cut off his laughter. He watched Holl as he felt like a blind man over the front of the far house; then a door opened, a tiny slit of primrose-yellow light in the ashy moonlight. After a querulous buzz of muttering argument, the door opened a little wider, blinked, and closed suddenly. Holl had gone in.
Alone in the silent clearing, Alan sat under the moon. He tried to imagine Holl in there, but he could not believe the house had any inside. He thought of brothels, but they were ridiculous places. He had to stop the laughter again. There was one, he remembered, off the rue de Lappe, the long bar running down the long long room. There was the Madame in traditional black bombazine at the till; there were the women idling about like hens, desultory after feeding, sometimes naked, sometimes with a piece of gauze or two here or there. He was sitting at the long bar with a naked girl on a high stool on his right (her eyes were less like polished rocks than most of them), and on his left a highly tightly dressed girl in spectacles who was a researcher in sociology and who kept on leaning across him to address the more earnestly the girl on his right. Obviously, she was saying, the social security angle was not so good – she was interrupted by a brief sharp skirmish as Alan repelled the hand from his right that was infiltrating into his trouser pocket – but what she really wanted to know, in that husky-sweet deep Virginian voice, was, did the girls really find the work interesting?
He leaped in the seat of the truck like a hooked fish his hand skittering inexpertly for his gun.
‘Dreaming again!’ said Holl jovially. ‘You’ll be the death of us all one of these days. There are times, Alan, when it seems to me you’d have done better to apply for some staff job. The gold tooth glinted. ‘Now; this is serious. There’s only two of ’em there. A peach of a crumpet, all eyes, and shy. And then there’s Aunt Jemima. I bagged the young one. After all, first come, first served, eh, old boy?’
His laughter made them both jump.
‘And how old’s Jemima?’
‘Ah well,’ said Holl, with a finger along his nose. ‘We must be charitable. Say thirty-five? Thirty in the shade. Never can tell actually with these chinks. But game, lad. Game.’
‘Toss you for it,’ said Alan.
‘My God!’ said Holl. ‘You’re sordid. Come on, now, climb out of that truck. We’ll have to look slippy. Better take off the distributor head, what? Nothing in the truck pinchable? All proper precautions?’ His leering whispers scurried away into the shadows. ‘What are we waiting for?’
Alan tried to explain that he did not, personally, find Chinese women fascinating. His idea of heaven was a large nordic blonde, like a honey-coloured sofa for relaxation.
Holl started to argue, mulish.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ said Alan, suddenly exasperated, ‘get along and do your duty as an officer and a gentleman. Then we can all go home to bed.’
Holl drew himself up stiffly. ‘If that’s the way you look at it, you bloody little prig, that’s exactly what I shall do and good day to you.’ He stood looking at Alan haughtily, then sketched a salute, and lurched over towards the far house. The door opened again, and he vanished. Almost immediately the door swung wide again, and out of an eldritch scream a slight figure in pale trousers fled from the house, and disappeared into the shadow back of the houses. Electrified, baffled, Alan saw Holl come out. He stood peering about a little, and then came back towards Alan.
He was cross. ‘Bloody little flirt. Which way did she go?’
Alan indicated the direction the girl had not gone. Holl went clattering clumsily amongst the banana leaves, and then came back again. ‘Not a hope.’ He was morose. ‘She’ll be in Singapore by now.’ He swore copiously, and then stood reflecting. ‘Aunt Jemima it must be, then. Just as well you didn’t – ’ He leaned on the truck, and thought a bit. ‘Just as well, he said eventually. ‘Well. Bye-bye for now. I shan’t be long.’
Once again the door of the Chinese house shut behind him. This time it stayed shut. In Alan’s stomach a slow spiralling movement began to turn and to lift. He considered it carefully. It was like nausea, but it was not. He diagnosed it; it was laughter. He would have nothing to do with it and restraining a bucking motion of his head that wished to throw up and bray to the sky, he quelled it; it was hysteria. His hands trembling, he lit a cigarette. After the spurt of the match, the wide-eyed silence settled back again to stare at him. The little row of houses stood there, hollow and dead; nothing could live in there except cobwebs, and spiders big as rats jerking every now and then in the silted dust. Holl would never come out again; the elderly lady was a Japanese spy in no disguise, answering the obscene nakedness of Holl with naked knives. In the soft deep shadows with the sharp edges lurked violence.
Alan wiped his forearm across his sweating face; a sickly lemonish odour clung to him. It was only his anti-mosquito cream but it clung as close as gas. It was difficult to breathe, and breathing, he coughed, and shook the edges of the clearing like canvas scenery. His cough had split the silence open, and it roared, composed now of the voices of a million frogs, through whose bass thunder came suddenly the warning of a high-pitched treble drum. Thrice it beat, and the last beat was introductory to some statement, or herald of some tremendous entry. But nothing happened. After a gap, the three notes struck again, and again left the world suspended on its last beat. Alan’s flesh began to creep; his fingers clenched. The shadows were advancing with supreme stealth, shrinking then clearing. Then the three notes rang again, and this time with relief he recognised them as a bird, the Fever Bird, the Knocking on the Ice bird that cannot let the darkness be.
He dragged deeply on his cigarette, and scornfully exhaled. But still he was sweating, and the sweat, acrid with mosquito cream, stung his eyes; the silence built up again beneath the roar of frogs. He thought, wilfully, of Holl, involved in there in his travesty of the last intimacy, and hurriedly he pushed the thought out – it was too vivid. He thought of Lettice; laying his palms on his chest, he summoned the thought of Lettice. It occurred to him, behind shut eyelids, not un-gratifyingly, that he had been very loyal to Lettice; he hadn’t made love to anyone, apart from a perfunctory expected kiss here and there in the way of war-work, since he had left England. Thirteen months ago. He thought, concentrating, that he loved her; clenching his eyelids, he trawled for her in his darkness. His thought came up, empty, yet radiant. Sparks of fire hurt his closed eyes, and his lips moved:
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see…
Somewhere on another plane, a thin pedagogic voice simultaneously contradicted this; Lettice, it said, had no existence in this Malayan night, though admittedly she might have, on the other side of the world, on the Backs in the November river-mist where the naked willows wept, for example, in someone else’s arms perhaps, in someone else’s mind perhaps. He frowned fiercely upon this, his head lifting, his nostrils dilating to apprehend her; they had a strange desultory rhythm when they walked together, bumping every now and then, touching by necessity. So, her hand would rest on his wrist…
In the hunched seat of the truck, he froze, his heart poised on the edge of silence like a stopped clock. Then he groaned from his stomach in pain, and said ‘Lettice!’ And almost in the same split second, jerking furiously up in the seat, to the abominable horseplaying Holl, he burst out: ‘You bastard!’
His hand, raised to smite Holl’s hand off his wrist, stopped dead in mid-air. It was not Holl’s hand; it was a small thin hand with long nails, laid light as a moth on his wrist; its owner was hissing softly for silence. At last, having survived, he looked up the arm, into the face of the girl in the pale trousers who had fled from Holl. She put her dark head on one side, flirtatiously, and smiled, and her hand moved in a fluttering caress on the skin of his arm. Dazed, he stared at her anonymous smiling face, the long oval under the smooth jet hair. Her eyes gleamed as she moved. She was speaking, very softly, with a lilt, with a humorous cajoling tinkle. Gradually, he understood that she wished him to come with her; her hand slid like a handle into his palm; her other hand slipped up into the hollow of his elbow, with infinite gentleness, and all at once he longed for her, so abruptly, so decisively that he had opened the truck door to get out before he realised what he was doing.
But the click of the door seemed to break something, and with a gasp the girl’s hand was torn from his, and she was gone away into the shadows. As he stood there bewildered, he saw that it was not the click of the door that had put her to flight; it was the door of the far house that had opened, and Holl was coming over to the truck. He had not seen the girl, who had had the truck between him and her as she fled.
Holl climbed in. ‘Gimme a cigarette.’
He seemed somewhat diminished, and in low spirits. Alan gave him a cigarette, automatically, and climbed in. He started the engine, turned the truck, its noise monstrous after so much silence, and engaged it again homewards on the narrow track between trees and water. When he had driven very carefully a little way, the spiralling movement began again in his stomach, and this time he could not control it. At first he giggled.
Holl, sucking fiercely at his cigarette, told him to cut it out.
With an effort, Alan subdued himself for the moment.
Holl, after some brooding, spoke. ‘First it was the Poles and Czechs and all those randy Middle Europeans. Not to mention the Jews.’
He pursued his thoughts in silence for a while. Then he said heavily: ‘And now – you realise, of course – those bloody Yanks’ll be occupying England. And what sort of hope in hell d’you suppose any English girl has got with that lot around on the streets?’ He paused a moment, and then burst out: ‘By God! There are times when I think it’s time this war packed up and we all went home.’
But the spiralling movement was whirling, out of control, through Alan’s body. Clutching the wheel with both hands, doubled up over it, he burst, braying, with laughter. Swiftly Holl reached across him to jerk the truck clear of the water and stop it. He swore venomously.
‘Get out! Cut that damn’ cackling, and stick your head in the stream. Move!’
Alan reeled from the truck, and kneeling by the parit, heaving, thrust his head, bubbling and choking, into the water. It was thick, tepid and slimy; he lifted his head, and tears ran through the slime on his face. The noise had stopped, but the outraged whooping and howling still strained for escape at his ribs and lungs, and rang in his head. He stayed a little on his knees, mopping at his face with his handkerchief. Most of the slime came away, but the tears would not stop.
From the truck, Holl advised him impatiently to puke and get it over.
At last, in relatively good order, Alan was able to get back into the truck, where Holl had taken over the wheel. He said he was sorry, and Holl grunted, and started up. He drove staidly and soberly, occasionally groaning rather mechanically. Once or twice he glanced sideways at Alan, curiously, and finally said, with something of grudging envy in his voice: ‘Where on earth did you get the booze from?’ Alan did not answer, and there was no further conversation till they had almost reached the approach to their camp. Here Holl stopped the truck, and, climbing out, executed a surprise attack on the sentries. Then for five minutes, in a white-hot rage, he blew them up, ending by putting two of them under arrest.
As they drove on up to their quarters, Alan remonstrated, and was blown up in his turn. They were, Holl pointed out, on active service in a theatre of war; the troops had to be taught that this was not a game.
To quieten him, Alan apologised.
They stood in the moonlight. There was nothing left except to go to bed, but they hesitated.
‘Good night, Holl,’ said Alan.
‘Good night,’ and Holl turned. But after a few steps, he stopped.
‘Alan.’
‘Yes.’
‘You might call me Sam.’
‘Oh. Of course. I’m sorry. Good night, Sam.’
‘Good night, Alan.’