A Woman of Bangkok (17 page)

So, accepting the inevitable in her usual realistic way, she opened her eyes on the blanched, blinding light inside her mosquito net and blinked them very deliberately four or five times.

First she put her hands behind her back and undid the brassiere. She pulled a pillow towards her, swept her hair from under her face and laid skin to linen. The hairclip which had been cutting her cheek fell out and lay on the sheet like a legless centipede. She felt so much more comfortable that she was tempted to try to doze off again, but she told herself it was Friday and she mustn’t. Stifling a yawn, she drew up her arm and glanced at the tiny gold watch which was clasped by a bracelet of tiny gold hearts to her wrist. The hands were in a straight line across the dial, with the hour-hand just past ten—it was in fact twenty-two minutes past—but she didn’t read the time as accurately as a foreigner would; she only looked at the hour-hand and to her it said approximately
‘Si mong chao’
—the fourth hour of the morning—near enough her normal time of resurrection.

Keeping her cheek to the pillow, she heaved herself over onto her back and lay with her legs spread and her eyes again closed. The brassiere still fitted cosily because she kept its wings pinched between arms and sides but her sarong had come undone and only a corner of it lay across her legs. Without opening her eyes or moving her head, she fished around for it and spread it more tidily over herself, her jewellery jingling. For she was Siamese and in spite of being also, as she liked to boast, the Number One Bad Girl of Bangkok, she retained a lot of her national, Buddhist, no even more fundamental than that, her feminine modesty, and especially she abhorred exposure of the lower part of her body except in the acts where such exposure was practically unavoidable.

She had kept her head still because when she let it lie to one side like this the ache didn’t see-saw round her skull so much, but as the pain in her head subsided, other discomforts become more noticeable and with a sudden groan she sat up, tore the mosquito-net apart and swung out her legs. She fished with her feet under the bed until she found the special sandals which the Siamese wear when they go to the bathroom and with agile toes fetched them forth and manœuvred them on. Then, snatching up the sarong and throwing it loosely round herself, and keeping the brassiere still nipped in place, she crossed to the door, unbolted it, and went out.

Clapping down the wooden ladder on her wooden soles she called, ‘Bo! Bochang!’ loudly several times, her voice harsh and rising. At first nobody seemed to hear but just as she reached the bathroom door and was filling her lungs for a real bellow the volubility below stairs ceased, there was a pause, and then Bochang’s voice, politely modulated, floated upwards.
‘Arai?’
What?

‘
Oliang yen, keow.
’
A
glass of iced black coffee.

‘Oh.’

The first today. She shoved open the
hongnam
door and shoved it half-shut behind her. Sunbeams slanting through the roof lit up the familiar equipment of a Siamese bathroom—on a raised square concrete throne the oval squatter, with a small round hole at the deep end and corrugated footrests like those on vintage motorcycles; the small jar of water beside it, a substitute for toilet paper; the old petrol tin full of soiled pieces of paper and flies; the huge earthenware vat of bathwater with its own clean dipper; and that fantastic system of tiny gutters and holes like mouse-holes which testify to the ingenuity of Siamese plumbers and also perhaps to their whimsical humour. Whipping off the sarong she squatted on her heels and relieved herself on the floor. Reaching for the dipper in the big vat she threw a little water between her legs and over her feet and then, filling it again, sluiced her urine down the nearest mouse-holes. She wiped herself sketchily on the sarong, re-donned it, this time doing it up securely round her waist. Then she went out, wrenching the door open and dragging it to behind her, all her movements being neat, rapid, and unnecessarily violent.

Back in her room she went automatically to her dressing table and seated herself on the stool in front of her three mirrors. First she took a general view of herself and then, thrusting her face towards the middle glass, a more detailed one of her face. The first showed her a statuesque body that was already well-fleshed and likely any day now (she feared) to topple over into grossness and unsightly folds. The second showed that her lipstick like the mascara was smudged (but that was only to be expected), that a new pimple was coming on her chin, that the whites of her eyes were anything but clear this morning and that the skin below them was not taut but puffy and discoloured. It was here, around the eyes, and in the two lines which curved deeper month by month from the wings of her nostrils down to and around the corners of her mouth that she saw most clearly the advances of age. She writhed back the smudged lips from her teeth and examined them closely. They at any rate were always in tip-top condition. But her tongue was like an autumn leaf, pink round the edges but yellow down the centre, down and round that central groove which was like the spine of a dying leaf. She sighed, got up, and, as all Siamese women do all day long, undid and did up her sarong again. Then she went to the bed and pulled the two pillows together and plumped them up and set them against the headrail, and she was just going to lie back against them when it occurred to her that Bochang was being a long time—goddam—so she went to the door and shouted ‘Bochang!’ and getting no reply, ‘Siput!’

‘Mem?’ came Siput’s voice from belowstairs.

‘Where is my coffee?’

‘Coming. Coming.’

‘I want it now. You know when I want a thing I must have it at once. Why do you make me wait?’

‘Bochang is so old. She walks slowly like a water buffalo.’

‘I think a water buffalo is like a racehorse compared with Bochang. She is as slow as one of those creatures that carries its whole house on its back.’

‘A crab?’

‘Yes. Or a snail. Or a tortoise.’

This exchange made her immediately feel better. Conversation was one of the chief pleasures of her life. She delighted to egg Siput on to criticize Bochang. She delighted to make fun of Bochang whom actually she liked better than anyone else under her roof except her son. And this thinking of nice girlhood things like water buffalo and horses and tortoises—it was a chance word of Siput’s that had opened up that vista. Life was not all fun by any means and waking up into it was a daily trial; but since the trial was a daily one and unavoidable while you had breath in your body you might as well make the best of it; there was plenty of time yet before things became unbearable and you did away with yourself—that end to which you would come, according to all the priests and soothsayers in whom you believed, not until you were fifty years old—many, many years yet, or at least quite a good few …

Going back to the dressing table she searched in the handbag she had used last night until she found her compact and a pair of tweezers. Then, lying on the bed, she re-arranged the pillows, one under her sideways-turned head and the other a few inches in front of her face with the compact-lid propped against it. She raised one arm under her head and fiddled with the compact until the mirror in its lid was reflecting her armpit to her eyes. Then with the tweezers she began plucking out the small hairs which were sprouting in it.

This was a weekly chore and one she liked. While she worked she was wholly absorbed in the job. To her it seemed that her life was one long round of duties, from finding fault with her servants, which was her idea of housekeeping, to parting men from their money at the Bolero, and all these jobs she did, in her opinion, well: she was a good worker. But none of those other jobs was as agreeable to her as this one of making herself beautiful. For every day she must begin afresh, like a potter, her material nothing but clay. And every day, at last, sometimes after hours of labour, she would turn out another work of art. To be sure it was always the same subject—the White Leopard, the far-famed dancing-girl, an idealization of her actual clay achieved with cloth and cosmetics—and to be sure beauty was becoming harder to achieve and never again would attain to the heights it had sometimes reached in the past—but it was not in the finished product she found her joy so much as in the processes of creation. Counting baths, she never spent less than three hours a day on her toilet; often, on days when she had a shampoo or a massage, it was more like five; but they were always the happiest hours of all, and nothing would induce her to skimp them.

And this plucking of the armpits was one of the nicest of the various rites. For first of all you could do it in bed. Secondly there was an artist’s pleasure in sliding the blunt nose of the tweezers over the skin towards the quarry and then with a sharp flick uprooting it and laying it alongside all the other hairs which had likewise been individually uprooted and laid out on the sheet. Neatness and deftness were required, such as were possessed by the little lizards that lived behind her mirrors: just so they would creep up to a mosquito on the walls and then with a sharp stab of head and tongue dexterously, unerringly, snatch it. Thinking of the tweezers as
chinchocks
and the hated hairs as mosquitoes amused her and added to her enjoyment of her work. And then there was the pain. No question but that that pain—that succession of small stinging ant-bites all confined to one small area of the body—was a pleasureable sensation; it was stimulating, and she liked inflicting it on herself. A counter-irritant, it diminished the throb in the temples and the staleness of whisky in the guts. In fact, if only she could get a draught of iced-coffee down her gullet …

With abrupt impatience she raised her head to shout but at that moment she heard the old woman shuffling and groaning on the stairs so she relaxed, setting up the compact-lid again because her movement had toppled it. And before Bochang appeared she began banteringly, ‘Goddam, old crock, have you been all the way to London by bullock-cart to fetch my coffee?’

‘Truly, Mem, it is not I that am slow. It is that pig of a Chinese in the shop. If I were still young and beautiful like Mem he would doubtless serve me in my proper turn, for what man can be discourteous to one who is young and beautiful like Mem? But because I am somewhat past my best—’

‘Somewhat? Your backside has been less wrinkled than your brow these twenty years, I think.’

Bochang realized that the words had no cruel intent: her Mem knew only too well that in a few years now her own face would start to crack all over like an old vase too: for the Buddha was like all men in this one particular; he was very hard on women. She placed the coffee on the table by the bed and stood looking down at her mistress through the mosquito-net, an affectionate smile on her brown homely face. ‘Is my Mem suggesting that next time I go to the coffee-shop I show the Chinese pig not my face but my—?’ and she slapped her behind.

The Leopard threw down her tweezers and laughed and laughed. Together they enlarged on the joke with shrieks of merriment. But servants have to be kept up to scratch so in the end she went back to her grievance again. ‘Are you not a good customer of that shop?’

‘Truly, yes, Mem. Twelve times a day I go at least, ten times for coffee for my Mem and once for coffee for myself.’

‘And every time you go to the shop you give the Chinese my money, don’t you?’

‘Truly, truly, Mem. One tic for every glass.’

‘And be sure he wants my money. Everybody wants my money. Money is everything and no man will be slow to serve you once he has seen it in your hand. No, Bochang: it is not your ugliness which is to blame for your slowness with my coffee. Rather it is the remains of your beauty. How long did you pause to pass the time of day with the seller of dried squid who is even now frying his squid on the pavement outside my door and it stinks like hell? I think you are a little sweet on that seller of dried squid and that is why it always takes you so long to fetch my coffee.’

‘The seller of dried squid is old and I think probably his own personal squid is as shrivelled as those he sells.’

Again the Leopard had to laugh for this was the humour of the older women attached to her father’s house and she’d learned to appreciate it while her chest was still flat as a boy’s.

Bochang saw that her Mem was feeling good because of the jokes so she ventured, ‘Mem was very drunk when she came home last night. She quarrelled very long and loudly with the American. The Python and the Black Mamba were made angry. They said they can no longer get any sleep in this house because every night the White Leopard fights with her men.’

‘What do I care what the Python and the Black Mamba say? I pay the rent for this room. When I am old or sick and have no money to pay my rent, then it will be time for those snakes to hiss and try to sting me.’

Bochang nodded her tousled head. ‘Today is the last day of November. Tomorrow Mem must pay her rent again.’

The White Leopard laughed, her tee-hee-hee laugh, full of mockery and delight. ‘And tomorrow I must pay you too, eh, Bochang? That’s what’s really worrying you, eh? Are you getting anxious, you poor old girl?’ And she laughed again, so much so that she shook the bed and the compact-lid fell forward with a flash of gold.

‘I fear nothing. Since her last monthly sickness Mem has been lucky and had a man almost every night. And last night the American who came was an old friend of Mem’s and doubtless paid exceedingly well as always before.’

‘That is where you are wrong.’ She set up the compact-lid with a vicious movement as it all came back to her. Her face was dark with anger. ‘Last night that American was not good to me. He said that he had been with me many times before and had always paid me well, which was true. But this time, he said, he had no money and he wished to sleep with me for love. That is why we quarrelled.’

‘But in the end he must have paid Mem, for Mem slept with him, and my Mem does not sleep with a man until he has paid her.’

‘He said he will pay me when he sees me next week.’