The Best Australian Stories (5 page)

The White Hole of Bombay

Nicholas Shakespeare

for Murray Bail

Now that I'm no longer living in India, whenever there's a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.

We lay stretched out on canvas chairs – Sylvia, her husband Hugh and I – within splashing distance of the pool, on a strip of lawn facing the Arabian Sea. It was VJ Day, and sounds and perspectives blurred in the midmorning heat. There was the hum of traffic along Breach Candy Road and a faint sweet-sour smell of garbage. If I half closed my eyes, the world receded to an oblong of intense blue sky that seemed a projection of the pool.

At the time – the late sixties – I had only been in India for a few weeks, and as a temporary member of the Breach Candy Swimming-Bath Club was new to its hierarchies. Ten yards away, staff from the Russian Consulate had their corner with a net that they strung up, ‘when not stringing up dissidents', to use Hugh's words. They didn't talk to anyone much, but thumped a leather volleyball back and forth. I could see a barefoot gardener in khaki shorts squatting as he pulled out weeds. Closer to, a woman even paler than I was squabbled with her teenage son in a needlepoint English accent very similar to Sylvia's.

At the glass-topped table where Sylvia had insisted I join them, a waiter in a white jacket unloaded his thousandth tray of the week, eyed by several sandwich-hungry crows.

Bogogoingg!

Sylvia squinted up, tensing. Above us, to our left, a muscular young man in tiny crimson swimming trunks bounced from the diving board.

Whoosh
. He struck the water.

Seconds later, a blond head broke the surface. He smoothed back his hair in the way a man does who wishes he had a mirror and swam to the steps to do it again. After another glance at the diver, Sylvia put on her reading glasses and picked up her
Illustrated Weekly
.

The Breach Candy Swimming-Bath Club was along the road to the Gymkhana Club. It never opened in the evenings, but on humid days its cold pool drew Bombay's expatriate community to jump in and afterwards enjoy a
nimbu-pani
, a refreshing blend of lime, sugar and water served in tall glasses. Aside from a couple of film stars, no Indians were members. In the circles in which the Billingtons moved, the place was known, good-naturedly, as the ‘White Hole of Bombay'.

The Billingtons were among the oldest members in every sense of the word. They were ‘part of the furniture' as much as the long planter's chairs that always needed repairing, or the glossy white plates from which we ate our buffalo-steak sandwiches. And rather like the swimming club itself – in pretty good trim but fractionally curling at the edges for being outdoors – they had about them a settled mediocrity. Other members exhibited a pragmatic energy, knowing that they would be leaving in eighteen months. The Billingtons in all probability were going to die here.

Even before meeting them, I had formed the image of a couple in late middle age, thrifty, childless, who lived in a modest apartment on Malabar Hill. No one seemed to have visited their home, but the tone in which ‘modest' was spoken hinted there were reasons why the Billingtons did their socialising at the club. This was only our second poolside encounter. Our first had taken place the previous Saturday. I was walking past a chair towards the end of the afternoon when I grew conscious of tight blue eyes investigating me over the top of a magazine.

‘You're not, by any chance, —.' She said my name.

‘That's right.'

The woman took off her glasses and stood at the second attempt.

‘Sylvia Billington.'

Her skin was lined beneath her make-up, as if stretched too much and then let go, and her straw-coloured hair, which she later assured me was once ‘as long as my elbow and red', had retreated in thin curls close to her scalp. She wore a jade swimming costume that advertised the swell of her breasts.

My initial impression was of a wrinkled, garish, rather sad woman who obtained her leverage by knowing who everyone was – and making sure that they knew her. Much of what she told me I had already gleaned: how she had started coming here after the Second World War, after her husband returned from Burma. How her husband – ‘Oh, where is he? You two would get on' – used to work for the British Biscuit Company and now was with Makertich & Co., importing textile machinery.

Sylvia Billington didn't think of herself as a transient ex-pat like the rest of us around the pool, but as a local with roots spreading far back. She had been born in India, the daughter of a Protestant Irish cotton merchant. India was where she had met and married Hugh before the war swept him further east.

On this first occasion, she alluded to her husband's ‘heroics' and was fishing for me to ask questions. She was even getting quite annoyed that I wasn't playing along, when one of the Russians yelled out and I turned to see a leather ball bouncing in our direction.

It was intercepted by a figure I hadn't really noticed before: a human bulldog, obviously British, in white shorts and a maroon and blue bush shirt. He sprang forward and with a surprisingly adroit motion fielded the volleyball, returning it in a hard, accurate throw.

The action had wrecked his cigarette. He paused to heel out the embers before advancing towards us.

‘Hugh, come here,' said Sylvia, waving him over.

Hugh Billington struck me then, and in subsequent conversations, as a man of decent instincts, principled, unbegrudging – and disarmingly dull.

‘Have I intruded?' He brushed a fly from his fleshy nose.

‘I was about to tell him about your time in Burma,' Sylvia said.

The saltiest morsel concerning the Billingtons was how Hugh's ‘very good war' was stippled by Sylvia's disappointment that he had not made greater capital of it, as if in some deliberate way he had beggared himself. But her pride in her husband was touching.

‘I have to sing his praises,' Sylvia said to me. ‘Being brought up in a certain way, Hugh doesn't talk much about anything, do you, darling? But you remember everything.'

I thought I glimpsed in her look the intensity of Sylvia's nostalgia to recapture, beneath the pot belly and strands of white hair, the brave man who had disappeared into the jungle for three long years and made it out.

I also saw a firm resistance on Hugh's part to being recaptured.

He stood there in the afternoon light, shrinking slightly.

‘I suppose I do,' he said, already puffing at another of his Indian cigarettes, ‘but I don't want to know some of it.'

Then. ‘We should be on our way.'

‘What are you doing later?' Sylvia turned to me suddenly, and before I could answer asked if I would be their guest at the Lancaster nearby, where they were having dinner.

In the hotel's inexpensive restaurant that night both Billingtons became quite tipsy. I had always enjoyed listening to older people and I must have seemed interested in their story. Besides, I liked them in their different ways. Sylvia, who had changed into an ankle-length dress and switched her lipstick from pink to mulberry, did most of the talking. I tried to bring Hugh into the conversation, asking him about his work, but he was evasive. These days, twenty-three years after Japan's surrender, he was, in his expression, ‘a very small biscuit' whom local bigwigs offered up as a friendly, familiar face to British businessmen looking for opportunities in the textile industry. ‘A lot of them are scared to invest because, will they get paid? The Indians have a track record of paying eventually, but “eventually” didn't suit my first company.' His indifference to his effect was laudable.

He was more forthright talking about the Russians (‘no better than the Japs'). Or cricket (keeping wicket for his regiment). Or – after several beers – the sorry state into which Burma, where he had distinguished himself with General Wingate's Chindits, had disintegrated. The problem was: these days Hugh's bosses at Makertich & Co. were less subtle in their demands for him to exploit what they supposed – absurdly – to be his lucrative Burmese contacts.

‘Burma's a place not many people know much about, but a lot of people are interested in for the wrong reasons,' he told me, during one of Sylvia's trips to the bathroom. ‘Its history is rather more hopeful than its future. I wouldn't rush back. If you like people who hate each other, it's paradise. But give 'em democracy and they use it to fight a civil war. Plus, it's not an easy place to get into. If they don't want you to come, they don't answer.'

Hugh implied that they had not answered.

*

Our second meeting was the one that took place a week later, on the morning of VJ Day. I had come to the pool to be on my own, but as I crossed the lawn I heard Sylvia say something in an unpleasant tone. Heads turned, and I caught sight of Hugh's harried face. I saw that he wouldn't mind if I came to his rescue.

So instead of walking on to the chair that I'd earmarked, I stopped at the Billingtons' table and interrupted their argument.

‘Look who's here,' said Hugh.

‘Hello, you …' The effect was a little theatrical since Sylvia had watched me approach.

Whatever ploy I used to dissolve their tension, I can't recall, but soon there was laughter. Once the heads had turned back, I felt I could smile: ‘There, what was all that about?'

I was aware of the noon heat and the unresolved domestic humidity in the air and Sylvia telling me how outrageously Hugh had been treated. She was so forward, so un-English, that it crossed my mind she had been drinking.

‘Hugh won a Victoria Cross for what he did there,' she said. ‘A fat lot of good that is. It means when he applies for a visa they don't even reply!'

‘A Victoria Cross?' I was unable to mask my admiration. I'd imagined a DSO, something like that.

‘See!' Her irritation was vindicated. ‘But if Hugh had his way, he'd forget the whole thing. He won't even attend the annual church service any more.'

‘You sure you won't have one of these, dear?' said Hugh.

‘No, I'm going for a swim. But he might,' and she beseeched me to pull up a chair and join her husband in a toasted sandwich.

Sylvia grabbed her bathing cap, which was covered with imitation petals, and turned it inside out before stretching it over her head.

‘Tell him, Hugh. Don't tell me. It's not all stuff you can't speak about.'

She stood and manoeuvred her toes into a pair of flip-flops.

‘My husband can tell you what he did on the night of June 15 1944.'

So over a glass of beer and a buffalo-steak sandwich, which we both agreed was, as always, overcooked, Hugh opened up, without too much prodding from me. I wondered if it was VJ Day that had stirred him. Or whether it was to satisfy his wife. Some sort of concession for which the uneven calculus of marriage had ordained me the receptacle, like a loose volleyball punched in my direction which I had no alternative but to catch. Or maybe he was bored and sick of the heat and being stuck in Bombay.

‘My wife wants me to jump up and down and make a fuss. Truth is, I don't want to go back to Burma. Not even for her.' He flicked his eyes to the pool where the orb of her cap stood out like a bullseye. Then, in the same tone with which he had made his crack about the Russians: ‘I wouldn't want to leave Sylvia on her own. She's not very good on her own.'

*

Maybe the most impressive thing about Hugh Billington was his indifference to his own heroism. After he had told me how he won his Victoria Cross, he lay back. ‘I'm going to take a nap.'

I had hoped to steal away before Sylvia returned, but I was still sitting there when a shadow fell across my chest and I jerked up, preparing to bat away a hungry crow.

‘Well? Did he reveal all?'

‘I think so.'

Sylvia glanced at her husband's prostrate figure, eyes closed, a dribble of gravy at the corner of his mouth. He was a big man who could move when he wanted to. Even so, it was hard to think of those legs and arms crawling back through the mud and darkness to rescue eleven of his men; this was after he had been tortured and interrogated by the Japanese. He had escaped, disguised as a Kachin villager, resolving never to leave Burma without his comrades.

‘Hugh?'

He nodded, not stirring nor opening his eyes.

‘I'm glad. It's important for people to know.' She turned to me: ‘He's so modest it makes one scream. Of course, he's spared me the details, but it was beyond horror.'

Imitating what I took to be his voice, she tilted towards me in case he overheard her whisper. ‘Think of the worst, most inhumane way you can treat people. Double it. The worst, the worst.'

Hugh made a sound for her to be quiet.

I said in a hushed voice: ‘What Hugh did was extraordinary.' I knew lots of war stories, but nothing so brave, or selfless; and not because I had heard it direct.

Sylvia peeled off her bathing cap and shook her hair. ‘You wouldn't think so looking at him, would you? I get upset when he leaves it to me to blow his trumpet.' She reached for a towel and patted her glistening cleavage. ‘I don't go around asking people to listen to him, you know.' She stared at me in a way to suggest that Hugh, by speaking, had conferred a rare honour on me, and that we were very few, we appreciators of the courage of her husband, this far-from-successful machinery importer who had begun quietly to snore.

‘No, he's a real treasure is Hugh,' creaking into her chair.

Sylvia let the towel fall to the grass and loosened her straps. Then she dipped her fingers into a shallow blue tin and started smearing Nivea into her calves and shins. Like so many of us, Sylvia didn't see herself in the present, but ten years before. She was facing me, to make sure I was attentive, and maybe to intimate that she had been a good-looking woman when she was my age. But I was thirty, she in her mid-fifties. I didn't find her sexually attractive or even poignant – not then, not in that moment.