Often they were conscious of having dead time on their hands, lying in bed in the half-darkness, talking softly because the widow was in her room not far off, and because there was little to say since time was shortening before that big three-funnelled flag-bedecked boat rolled into the straits and narrows of Singapore and he tottered up its gangplank loaded to his forehead.
I wish I’d realized what I was doing when I let that bloke go. I’d still have made him scoot; but if only I’d done it cold and intentionally. He felt as if he’d been tricked and laughed at, not knowing how the trick worked or when it began to work or what had caused it to begin ticking away inside him. He had an idea, though, that it all began before he was born, certainly at a time when he was powerless to know or do anything about it. But he couldn’t come to any conclusion, maybe not wanting to, because it might tell him that after all he could blame no one for the trick that had been played on him except himself.
They heard the widow walking about her house, then silence. “She’ll start sewing now,” Mimi whispered, turning her warm body towards him. “You’ll hear the machine. It’ll go on for hours, I think.”
“It’s funny,” he said, “me not having seen the old woman. She’s been our guardian angel in one way.”
“She has.”
“What’s she like? You never say anything about her.”
“There isn’t much I can tell. I think she knows you come to stay with me now, but she doesn’t mention anything. We’ve never talked about you, but I just know she knows. Anyway, we won’t speak much. Sometimes I give her American dollar-bills so that she can exchange them for me into Malayan money, and she doesn’t give me as good a rate as the black-market. Still, it doesn’t matter. She is kind, and often she gives me rice or soup, sometimes tea when I come in late and she is still sewing or reading. When I can’t pay my rent, she doesn’t bother me.”
“Sounds a good woman.”
“She’s generous, but very careful with her money. I saw her shopping once at the market, and when she buys eggs she takes a bowl, fills it at the market tap, and tests the eggs in front of the stall-holder’s eyes. They don’t altogether like her, but she gets good eggs. Another thing, she goes shopping with her abacus frame and says: ‘I want that, how much is it?’ Tack-tack go her beads. ‘And how much is this?’ Tack-tack-tack. ‘And that?’ Tack-tack. ‘Well,’ she says, tack-tack-tack-tack, ‘that will be so much, won’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, knowing that he can’t even put on an extra cent!”
Brian reached out and lit cigarettes for them: “Is she happy, or what?”
“I think so. Why shouldn’t she be? She had shares in a rubber estate, among other things.” Smoke blew across his face. “She has relatives in Pulau Timur.”
“Why does she live alone, though? Chinese grandmothers usually live with their families, don’t they?”
“She wants to live alone. I don’t know why.”
“She’s got you in the house.”
“We don’t see each other much.”
“Not to mention me,” he laughed. “I wonder if she’ll be lonely when I’ve gone? To tell you the truth, I used to make up stories as to what she was. I imagined she was some sort of Communist agent or other, getting information, or recruiting people for the cause, a sort of commissar for north Malaya, wreaking havoc among the British occupying-power.”
She laughed. “How silly you are!”
“Well, you’ve got to have something to do at the DF hut, or you go off your head waiting for the boat to roll on.” The brief and hidden mention of his departure struck them both into a momentary silence. “Mimi,” he said, “just before we got caught in that ambush up in the mountains I captured a bandit, a Chinese.” The story came out, as he’d known it would before he left her. “I let him go,” he said, “because I couldn’t kill him. And later in the ambush I didn’t aim for anything. I fired where nothing could be hurt. It took some doing, but I held back. I did it.” He talked on, and she listened with such interest that neither approval nor disapproval was written on her face. She sat on the bed, a cigarette smouldering from her hand.
“Why?” she said at the end of it. “Why?”
He was angry that she hadn’t understood. “Because that’s how I wanted it to be,” he said. “I just thought I’d tell you, that’s all. Don’t you get it?”
The last fortnight dragged its slow length along like a chain-and-ball ankle crossing a wide high gorge by a six-inch bridge — with Brian all of a sweat that it might never get him to the other side. The camp lapsed into its state of sordid demoralized siege, and he was always glad to escape from it. Barbed wire was rolled out along the boundaries, sandbags filled and erected at vulnerable places, extra guards mounted until it seemed that only half the camp slept in the night. There was even talk that the privileged members of the signals section were to be drummed into filling sandbags. The final indignity, many said, conscription within conscription — unable to believe it could happen.
And so Merton had died, and he remembered it again, how he had taken to the earth with so little resentment after nearly fourscore years of staying in life like a fire that matched the glowing coals of his forge. His wife went six months later, drifted off into an afternoon sleep and never woke up. By which time Brian was already in Malaya, in distance even beyond their wildest dreams of Abyssinia, the limits of the fantastic world they had laughingly taunted him with on those far-off rainy evenings as a kid. When he read Kubla Khan or the Blessed Damozel and other anthological bits and pieces in the bottom-nightwatch of the DF hut, the mood cast over him equalled that tranquil dream recalled from a long way back, the mirrored image of a winter’s childhood when, one peaceful afternoon, he sat looking out of the window at another fire reflected, as if it were held up by some beneficent god for him to see as proof that there were possibilities of comfort even beyond the warmth of his own house. What had fired off this barbed harpoon, sent it zigzagging back on a tenuous line of cord, may have been his night-long reading of the poems, but it was the first time he realized that he had a past, and had not evolved out of a dream. He could say: “I remember that time walking across the Cherry Orchard ten years ago and meeting Alma Arlington,” ten years being no longer a meaningless massive chunk of time, but something that could be dissected and sorted out, and called a past. In a week he would be on that boat, going back in a way to join himself up with this past, and the idea of it was one alternately of fear and distaste, as well as one similar to the feeling that came over him when reading the poems. Nevertheless, little of the past was yet visible; and neither had he much vision of the future, but at least he knew that both existed. “This time in Malaya is a big slice out of my life,” he said to Knotman over a table crowded with bottles in a Muong bar. “Maybe it seems like that now,” Knotman argued, “but I’m telling you, you’ll look back on it in ten years and it’ll seem like a dream that lasted a few days.” “Well, I can’t imagine that,” Brian said. “You will”—Knotman filled their glasses.
Those from the signals billet were rounded up with clerks, cooks, drivers, and orderlies to fill sandbags. Brian had no confidence in what they were being made to fortify, believing that sooner or later, even if they built a stone wall ten yards high, the whole lot would crumble. But he worked hard and for a long time and, though not particularly tired, knew he was in a fever. Sometimes he spoke a word out loud to isolate the sound of his own voice, and once when he got an exact image of it, had to thrust it away for fear of running insanely towards the sea. Surrounded by many people, he felt entirely alone, worked within the clearly defined circle of his own actions. They had been on the go since seven, with only two breaks, and he dug at the sand mechanically, sometimes getting a light shovel that slewed against the embankment, at others finding the load so heavy that some had to be tipped off. His throat ached for a drink of water, a walk under shady trees to spend a few minutes away from filling sandbags. Those farther along the embankment had the worst of the job since they were in sight of the guard-house and had to keep on working, unable to skive off for a drink now and again, as he had done. The sentries were monuments of perspiration. “What did you say?” Kirkby demanded. “Nothing,” Brian replied; “I must have been thinking aloud.”