War and Remembrance (12 page)

“Oho!” she said as she set foot on deck. “The British! I wondered where they were.”

“Everybody’s here that matters,” said Rule.

Under a brown awning the laughing, chattering guests were standing
around drinking cocktails, or waiting in a reception line that stretched to the sunlit forecastle. The men wore white linen suits or bright-hued blazers, the women, flowery print dresses fluttering in the breeze. All the faces were white, unless the owner of the face carried a tray. Four long guns painted in garish patches like snakeskin projected beyond the awning.

“Mr. Tudsbury?” said a young officer at the gangway. “The admiral’s compliments, sir. Please follow me.”

They went to the head of the line. The admiral, a surprisingly small man with crusted gold shoulder marks on his white uniform, held out a small scrubbed hand. “Frightfully pleased. Very keen on your broadcasts.”

He presented them to several stiff old men lined up beside him. Their sharply tailored tropical uniforms showed knobby gray-haired knees and elbows; their military titles were majestic, the highest brass in Singapore. The roar of airplanes interrupted the pleasantries; wave upon wave coming in low from seaward, scarcely clearing the
Prince of Wales’s
masts, then zooming over the waterfront. Distant guns boomed. Beyond the city, clouds of white smoke puffed up against the blue sky. Tudsbury shouted to the admiral, “Would those be our famous coastal guns?”

“Just so. Heaviest calibre in the world. Jolly good marksmanship, my target-towing ships report. Approaching Singapore in anger from the sea
not
advisable!”

“I’d like to visit those guns.”

“It will be arranged.”

All this was a series of yells through the racket of the air show. Tudsbury gestured upward. “And these planes?”

A tall grayhead in RAF uniform, standing next to the admiral, flashed pride from filmy wrinkled eyes. “Vildebeest and Blenheim bombers leading the pack. The fighters are American Buffaloes. Can’t touch our Spitfires, but dashed good, better than what the Japs have got.”

“How do you know that, sir?”

“Oh, Jap planes have fallen in China, you know.” The gray eyebrows arched in cunning. “We have the book on them. Second-rate, rather.”

Rule and Pamela stood at the rail amid a crowd of beaming British, watching the planes. He picked drinks off a tray passed by a Chinese boy. “God, Pam, your father does have a way with the brass. That’s Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham talking to him. Boss of the whole theatre, Commander-in-Chief, Far East. They’re chatting like old school chums.”

“Well, everyone wants a good press.”

“Yes, and they know he’s got the popular touch, don’t they? All acid and disenchanted in tone, yet in the end it comes out straight Rudyard Kipling, every time. For God and for Empire, eh, Pam?”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“Why, it’s pure gold. False as hell to the future, but why should he care, since he believes it?”

The planes were dwindling in the distance. Pamela sipped her drink, peering fore and aft along the gigantic deck. “You know, Phil, Captain Henry visited this ship when it brought Churchill to Newfoundland. Now we walk its deck off Malaya, and he’s commanding a monster like this in Hawaii. Unreal.”

“Rather on your mind still, your Yankee captain?”

“That’s why I’m here. Pearl Harbor’s my destination. Talky knows that.”

Rule grimaced and pulled at his mustache. “Look, I’m staying at the home of Jeff McMahon, the head of the Malayan Broadcasting System. Let’s all go to dinner at Raffles tonight, shall we? Jeff wants to meet your father and put him on the air. Talky will like Elsa. She’s the most beautiful woman in Singapore.”

“Then her husband’s a fool to have you in the house.”

“Why, darling, I don’t abuse a man’s hospitality.” Pamela’s response was an arched eyebrow and a contemptuously wrinkled mouth. “You’ll come to dinner, then?”

“I don’t mind. I can’t speak for Talky.”

Later the fat old correspondent, in the highest spirits, readily agreed to dine with Singapore’s most beautiful woman. “Of course, dear boy. Smashing. I say, the air chief marshal’s a brick. I’m to visit the most secret military installations here. Not one door closed. And I’m to write what I bloody well please.”

Elsa McMahon wore clinging ivory silk jersey, the only modish dress Pamela had yet seen in the colony. Her heavy glossy black hair might have been done in Paris. Four children milled and clattered about the rambling house, pursued by scolding servants; but the woman had a willowy figure, a cameo face, and the clear smooth skin of a girl, tanned to a rosy amber by tennis. She showed Pamela her house, her books, a whole wall of phonograph records, and before the sunset failed, her tennis court and the garden: a big disorderly expanse of lawn, high palms, flowering bushes and trees — gardenias, hibiscus, jasmine, and jacaranda —in air almost chokingly perfumed. Her easy English had a Scandinavian lilt, for her father had been a Norwegian sea captain. Her husband kept eyeing her as though they had been married a month.

They were killing time over drinks, waiting for Tudsbury to get away from an interview with the governor, when he rang up. The governor had just asked him to dine at the Tanglin Club. He was at the club now. Would Pamela and her friends forgive him, and join them, at the governor’s invitation, for a drink?

Rule said testily, as Pam still held the phone, “Pamela, that’s damned rude of him. Our dinner was all set. Tell him and that pompous-ass governor they can both go to hell.”

“Nonsense, he can’t turn down the governor,” said Jeff McMahon amiably. “The Tanglin Club’s on our way. Let’s go.”

It was a short drive from the McMahon house. Pulling to a stop at the club entrance, the director of the Malayan Broadcasting System turned to Pamela. “Here you are. Elsa and I will buzz on to the Raffles bar. Don’t hurry for dinner. The music goes on till midnight.”

“Nonsense. Park the car and come on in. The governor invited all of us.”

“I resigned from the Tanglin, Pam, when I married Elsa.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Elsa McMahon in the front seat turned her head. The dark eyes were solemn, the lovely mouth taut with irony. “My mother was Burmese, dear. See you at the Raffles.”

The Tanglin was spacious, sprawling, and stuffy. Full-length court portraits of the king and queen dominated the foyer; London magazines and newspapers were scattered about; and under the slow-turning fans, the everlasting white-coated colored boys hustled with drinks. A bibulous and strident noise filled the club, for the evening was well along. Tudsbury sat at the bar amid the same people Pamela had seen aboard the
Prince of Wales.
The men were getting quite drunk. The women’s evening dresses were as dowdy as their daytime getups. The governor was a placid, unbelievably dull person. Pamela and Rule downed one drink and left.

“Well, the McMahons didn’t miss much!” she said, as they came out into a moonlit night heavy with flower scent. British clear through, Pamela believed in the happy breed’s superiority, though she never spoke of it. She knew such clubs had such rules; all the same, the exclusion of Elsa McMahon had enraged her.

“Come along, you’re surely not just discovering the hard facts of imperialism.” Rule beckoned to a waiting taxicab. “How do you suppose twenty thousand whites, most of them frail ninnies, manage to rule four and a half million Malayans? Not by hobnobbing with them.”

“She’s as much a native as I am.”

“One can’t allow exceptions, love. The dikes of imperial snobbery hold back a raging sea of color. One pinhole, and they crumble. That’s doctrine. Elsa’s a wog.” He put on a nasal aristocratic voice. “Dashed pity, and all that — so in you go, and let’s join our wog lady friend.”

In the open palm-lined courtyard of the Raffles, a five-piece band of old white men played listless out-of-date jazz. It was very hot and damp here. The McMahons sat at a table, watching three gray-haired couples sweatily
shuffling on the floor. Their greeting to Pamela and Rule was untainted by rancor. They gossiped about the governor with tolerant amusement as they ate.

He was a harmless sort, they said, the son of a vicar. The heat, the bureaucracy, the confusion and complications of his job, had reduced him in seven years to a blob of benign jelly. Nothing could shake, change, or ruffle him. The Malay States were an administrative madhouse, with eleven separate local governments — including some touchy sultans — to deal with. Somehow half of the tin and a third of the rubber that the democracies used came out of this mess. There was money to be made, and it was made. Dollars had been steadily flooding into the British war chest. The people who did the work — two million Moslem Malays, two million Buddhist Chinese, about half a million Indians — all disliked each other, and united in loathing the white handful who ran things, headed by this serene white invertebrate living in Government House, on a high hill inside a big park, far from the congestion and smells of native Singapore. He had had seven years of continuous commendation from London, for keeping the wheels turning. He had done absolutely nothing except let it happen. In the British Colonial Service, said Jeff McMahon, that approached genius.

“Perspectives differ,” Rule observed. “I heard a three-hour tirade today against him. The Associated Press man, Tim Boyle, says he’s a tough bully with a censorship mania. Tim wrote a piece about the night life here. The censor killed it dead. Tim demanded a meeting with this governor, who bawled him out like a coolie. The governor’s first words were, ‘I read that story. If you were an Asiatic, I’d put you behind bars.

“Ah, that’s different,” said Elsa. “The British Colonial Office has a long memory. America started as a colony. Once a native, always a native.”

The McMahons ate little. After the coffee they got up and danced sinuously to the thin music. Rule held out his hand. “Pamela?”

“Don’t be an ass. I break out in a sweat here, with every move I make. Anyway, you know you can’t dance. Neither can I.”

“You asked Slote to dance with you in London.”

“Oh, I was cutting you.”

“Sweetie, you can’t still be angry with me.” The red mustache spread in an unoffended grin. “It all happened in another age.”

“Granted, Phil. You’re a yellowing diploma on the wall. Just hang there.”

“Crushed again! Well, I like your indignation over Elsa. But she’s a popular woman, and the Tanglin Club is a bore she can do without. What about the Chinese and Indians you saw uptown, swarming like rats in a garbage dump? That’s Singapore’s real color problem.”

Pamela was slow to answer. She had no political, social, or religious certainties.
Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks. Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry’s Christian morality and Rule’s militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had. So she thought.

“I’m a duffer on those matters, Phil. You know that. Hasn’t Asia always been more or less like this — a few rajahs and sultans eating off gold plate, building temples and Taj Mahals, while the masses multiply in cow dung and mud?”

“We came to change all that, love. So says Kipling. And Alistair Tudsbury.”

“Haven’t we made things better?”

“In a way. Railroads, civil service, a modern language. But Pam, there’s just been the hell of a flap here at the Tanglin Club. They barred from their swimming pool the Indian officers — the
officers,
I repeat — of the Fifth Indian Regiment! Educated military men, stationed here to lead soldiers to fight and die for the Tanglin Club! The decision stuck, too. It undid fifty years of Kipling.”

The McMahons left early to get back to their children; polite as they were about it, Talky’s defection had made the evening pointless. Philip Rule walked with Pamela through the hotel lobby. “Tuck your mosquito netting in firmly, darling,” he said at the stairway. “Check every edge. A few of those creatures can drain you like Dracula.”

Pamela looked around at the Chinese boys in white coats, crisscrossing through the broad lobby with trays. “The boozing, the boozing! Does it ever stop?”

“I was told, the first day I came,” said Rule, “and I’ve since heard it forty times in the white man’s clubs — that Singapore
is
a place of ‘drinks, Chinks, and stinks.’ “ He kissed her cheek. “Good-night. I shall now hang myself back on the wall.”

The first bombs fell on Singapore at four in the morning. Pamela was half-awake, sweating under the mosquito net, when she heard thrumming overhead. Vaguely she thought it was a night fighter exercise. At the first distant thumps she sat up, swept aside the netting, and ran into the sitting room. Tudsbury lumbered out of his room blindly blinking, clutching pajamas over his hairy belly. “That’s bombing, Pam!”

“I know it is.”

“Well, the yellow bastards! They’re really trying it on, are they? By Christ, they’ll regret this!”

Airplane roars came and went overhead. Bombs were bursting closer and louder. Pulling off his pajama top, Tudsbury stumbled back into his
room. Pamela called from the french windows, “Talky, we haven’t even blacked out!” The streets were brilliantly lit. Clouds overhead reflected the glow. She saw no searchlights or tracer bullets, heard no sirens or ack-ack. It was nothing like a London raid. The one difference from other warm odorous Singapore nights, in fact, was that invisible planes overhead were dropping bombs, which the city was serenely ignoring.