State of Siege (5 page)

I was glad of the respite. After the Tangga hills Selampang was suffocatingly humid, and even a light cotton shirt seemed like a blanket. Also, I had had three large brandies at the apartment; one more than I really wanted. I would be busy the following day and had no intention of burdening myself with a hangover. I had no intention either, I told myself, of spending the night with some local drab selected by Jebb’s girl-friend. I had heard his telephoned instructions, and decided that there was a point at which hospitality became officiousness.
Besides, the breaking of a habit of continence, especially if it has been enforced, should not be too casually enjoyed. I had my own ideas about the occasion, and they did not, at that moment, include Selampang.

The New Harmony Club was outside the city. Beyond the race track there was a stretch of about a mile of straight, unlighted road, with large bungalow compounds on either side of it. It was very quiet on this road, and you could hear an approaching car almost as soon as you saw its lights. Even the cicadas seemed muted, and we had left behind the smell of the canals.

“Nice part this,” Jebb said; “as long as you’re not too near the race track.” The two
betjak
were travelling abreast now.

“Who lives here?”

“Foreign legations mostly. One or two rich Chinese. They have to pay through the nose for the privilege though. Look, there’s the club. That light ahead. Shove it along, Mahmud! We need a drink.”

It was a bungalow much like the rest, but with an electric sign by the entrance to the compound, and a gatekeeper in a peaked cap who peered at us intently as we turned in. As we stopped, the warm, humid air seemed to close in again, but now it was heavily scented by the frangipani growing in the forecourt; and from inside came the lush, sentimental, international sound of a night-club pianist playing American music.

In the vestibule a Chinese doorman in a sharkskin dinner jacket made out a temporary membership card for me, and sold me a pack of American cigarettes at double the black-market price. Then, we went through into the room beyond.

Once it had been two rooms, but arched openings had been cut in the old dividing wall to make it one. There was a teak-panelled bar at one end and a platform with the piano on it in an alcove. The rest of the space inside was filled with tables, about a dozen of them. Out on the covered terrace there were a few more tables and a small raised dance floor. The walls were painted to imitate stonework, and the light came from electric candles in wrought-iron wall brackets.

It was early, and only two or three of the tables were so far occupied. The bar, however, was crowded. Most of the men were Europeans, though there were a couple of slick young Sundanese in air-force uniforms sitting on bar stools and a neat Chinese with rimless glasses. The pianist was a supercilious-looking Indian wearing a gold bracelet and a ruby ring. A Dutch couple were leaning on the piano with glasses in their hands, listening to him raptly. The wife’s hair was untidy and she seemed to be a little drunk. The Indian was ignoring them.

“ ‘A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon,’ ” Jebb quoted facetiously, and began to elbow his way towards the bar, exchanging greetings
with people as he went. “Hullo, Ted. How’re you doing, sport? Hi, Marie.”

Marie was a stout, dark girl with big, protruding teeth and a tight silk dress. She smiled mechanically and blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. Jebb winked at me. I had no idea what the wink meant, but I grinned back understandingly. The effort was wasted. He was greeting the Chinese with the rimless glasses.

“Evening, Mor Sai. Want you to meet a pal of mine, Steve Fraser. Steve, this is Lim Mor Sai. He owns the joint.”

As we shook hands, a middle-aged blonde with haggard eyes and a foolish mouth came through the door beside the bar and slipped an arm through Jebb’s. “Hullo, Roy love,” she said. “I thought you were going to Makassar.”

“No, that’s tomorrow. Molly, this is Steve Fraser. Steve, this is Molly Lim.”

She gave me a glassy stare. “Another bloody Britisher, eh? Why don’t you people stay at home?”

I smiled.

“One day, my darling,” said her husband primly, “you will make such a joke too often. Then, a lot of our furniture will be broken and there will be trouble with the police.”

“Oh, go on with you!” She fondled his cheek. “He knows I’m pulling his leg. I’ll give you three guesses
where I come from, Mr. Fraser, and the first two don’t count.”

“Lancashire?”

“Of course. Mor Sai says I even speak Cantonese with a Liverpool accent. Isn’t that right, love?”

Lim looked bored with her. “As this is your first visit to the club,” he said to me, “you must have a drink on the house.”

“That’s what we’ve been waiting to hear,” said Jebb. “We’re drinking brandy.”

“You’ll find it on the bill,” said Mrs. Lim sardonically and moved away.

Lim snapped his fingers for the barman and gave the order. Jebb nudged me. I glanced across the room and saw Mrs. Lim snatch a glass out of a man’s hand and swallow the drink at a gulp. The man laughed.

Lim saw it, too. The moment our drinks came, he excused himself and went over to where she was standing.

“I ought to have warned you about our Molly,” Jebb said. “Don’t buy her a drink, whatever you do.”

“It doesn’t look as if she waits to be bought one.”

“Yes, you have to hold on to your glass when she’s around. That bastard should know better. He’ll be unpopular with Lim if he’s not careful.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s as well to keep on the right side of him. Lim’s
got friends in the police department. You know the time they take over exit papers? A week sometimes if they feel bloody-minded. Last time I went on leave, Lim got everything for me in a couple of hours, and I bet you …” At that moment he broke off, grinned over my shoulder and said: “Hi, Mina baby!”

I looked round.

Eurasian women are difficult to describe accurately. One’s first impression is always dominated by one set of racial characteristics to the virtual exclusion of the other; but closer acquaintance always seems to reverse that first impression. It is not just a matter of clothes; a European dress can make the same woman look both more Asian and less; the change is as unpredictable as it is with those optical illusions with which you may make a pyramid of solid cubes become a pyramid of empty boxes, merely by blinking.

At first sight Mina looked completely European. She was a slim, attractive brunette with the sort of aquiline bone structure that you find mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean; Greek, you might have guessed. Her friend, Rosalie, on the other hand, looked like a Filipino girl of good family who had learned to wear her clothes at an American university. Yet, after ten minutes, Mina’s features had become for me unmistakably Sundanese, while Rosalie looked like a European girl who was modelling her appearance on that of her favourite ballerina. Their voices had something to do with it. Both
spoke good English with Dutch accents; but in Mina’s voice you could hear the Sundanese gutturals as well. She was tense and emphatic. Rosalie was quieter and more self-assured.

Jebb had explained that they both taught Western dancing at a school run by a Chinese, and that we would be expected to pay them for spending the evening with us at the club. After midnight, further negotiations would become necessary; but I would have to conduct those myself. With Mina, he had a more or less permanent arrangement. Rosalie was known to be very choosey; if she did not like you, there was nothing doing, even if you were a millionaire. It was up to me.

I was resigned, then, to a dull and probably squalid evening. It turned out to be neither. I think that the thing which broke the ice for me was the realisation that, unsentimental though it might be, the relationship between Mina and Jebb had at the same time a basis of genuine affection. I don’t think I was being ingenuous. You can be deceived about loving, but not so easily about liking.

Mina talked a great deal at first. Most of the time she was playing a favourite Sundanese game. If you owe a man money, or if he has caused you to lose face in any way, or if he is someone in authority whom you dislike, you invent a scandal about him, preferably with a wealth of scatological detail, suggesting that he is impotent, cuckolded or perverse. Nobody believes the
story, but the more circumstantial you make it, and the more carefully your audience listens, the more superior to your enemy do you become. Mina’s scandals were pungent and outrageous and she told them like a good comedienne, with a sort of bland amazement at their strangeness. Jebb’s part was to refuse to believe a word she said. If, for example, the story was about the Chief of Police, Jebb would declare that he knew the man personally and that her story was impossible. This in turn would lead to a further extravaganza in order to prove the first.

It could have been boring, but for some reason it wasn’t. Once or twice, when I laughed outright, she would laugh too, and then hasten to persuade me that what she had said was no laughing matter. Rosalie only smiled. Her attitude towards Mina was that of an adult towards a precocious child who may become overexcited; amused but guarded. Now and again I saw her out of the corner of my eye watching me shrewdly and weighing me up. I was surprised to discover that I did not mind. Once, she realised that I was examining her. She was saying something to Jebb at the time, and the realisation made her hesitate for a word; but otherwise she seemed completely self-possessed.

The dinner was Vietnamese and very good. After it we moved out on to the terrace and drank tea. Then, Lim switched on a record-player and we danced for a
while; but the small floor soon became too crowded for comfort and we wandered out into the compound.

Once there had been a garden neatly laid out with stone walks and flower beds and ornamental fish pools; now, it was all overgrown, the crotons and banana trees had run wild, and the pools were choked with Java weed. But the air was pleasantly scented and I was glad to get away from the noise of the record-player. I lit a cigarette and for a minute or so we walked along a path that had been roughly cleared to one side of the compound. Then a bat fluttered close to my head and I swore. The moon was very bright and I saw the girl look up at me.

“You do not have to be polite to me,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“It is eleven o’clock. Mina and Roy will not leave for two hours yet. You have had a long journey today. I think you must be very tired.”

“I’ve enjoyed this evening, but now, yes, I am tired.”

“Then you should go and sleep.” She smiled as I hesitated. “We can meet again tomorrow if you wish.”

“Yes, I’d like to do that. Roy’s going to Makassar tomorrow morning and I know no one else in this place. No one, that is, that I want to see.” I hesitated again. We had stopped and she was looking up at me.

“What is it you wish to say?”

“There is my side of the bargain too.”

“I do not think we need to talk about that. You will be here for two, three days. When you leave you will give me a present of money. If we have not liked each other, you will give it in contempt. If we have liked each other, it will make the parting easier. In any case you will be generous.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I am sure.”

That was all that was said. She took my arm and, in silence, we continued the circuit of the compound. It was a fine night and I suddenly felt peaceful.

We were walking along the path that ran parallel to the lane beyond the boundary fence, when I saw a light flickering through the bamboo thicket ahead of us.

“What’s that light?” I asked.

“There are some old kampong houses there. When the Dutch people were in the bungalow, that is where the servants lived. But I did not think that they were used now.”

The stone surface of the path had ended and we were walking on soft earth that deadened the sound of our footsteps. Then we heard voices ahead, and our pace became slower. One of the voices was Mrs. Lim’s and neither of us, I think, wanted to encounter her just at that moment. I was about to suggest that we turn back, when she began to shout at the top of her voice.

“And I say they can’t! Do you want us all murdered? You’re out of your bloody mind!”

A man said something quickly. Mrs. Lim uttered a sort of gasp, as if she had been hit, and then began to weep.

Rosalie’s hand tightened on my arm. Suddenly, there was a faint clatter of feet on wooden steps and then the sound of someone, Mrs. Lim presumably, hurrying back towards the bungalow.

For a moment we stood there uncertainly. We had half turned to go back; but the shortest way back to the bungalow was straight ahead, and there seemed no point now in retracing our footsteps. We walked on.

The servants’ houses were among some palm trees on the far side of a rough track that led from a gateway on to the lane. It was wide enough for a bullock cart and had probably been used as a sort of tradesmen’s entrance. The houses were built on teak piles, and the frames were substantial enough, but the
attap
walls had suffered in the monsoons and both places looked derelict. The light, which looked as if it came from a kerosene vapour lamp, was in the house farthest away from the track, and it shone through the tattered walls. A low murmur of men’s voices came from within. There seemed to be four of them. By the steps up to the verandah of the nearer house stood a jeep.

Jeeps are common enough in that part of the world. It was a bracket welded on to the side that made me stop and look at it. Quite a number of the ex-army jeeps had that bracket; it had been fitted originally to
support a vertical exhaust pipe when the jeep was water-proofed for driving out of a landing-craft; but this one was bent in a vaguely familiar way. I glanced down at the number.

In a place where you depend on mechanical transport for practically every move you make, even a highly standardised vehicle like a jeep acquires character, has its own subtle peculiarities, its special feel. You prefer some to others, and because they all look the same you learn to differentiate between them by their numbers.