A Woman of Bangkok (2 page)

‘No.’

‘Nor his wife?’

‘No.’

‘Poor Mr. Joyce. But perhaps she’ll be there tomorrow.’

I pretend to be astounded by the idea. ‘Where d’you mean? At the airport? She certainly won’t. And I damn well hope she isn’t.’ I hardly realize I am lying. Men are deceivers ever, especially of themselves. If she isn’t there, it’s going to be miserable. And if she is—

‘There’s our bus,’ cries Lena, breaking into a fast trot.

The film is
Ivanhoe
. The book was required reading at school and like all Scott, a thorough bore. I queue with a bad grace. But blessed is the pessimist, for he shall receive occasional pleasant surprises. For two hours, swiftly past, tomorrow, the future, Sheila, this century, are all abolished. Sunlight sparkles on castle walls; Sordello cavalcades ride forest trails; the Saxon baron is courteous, after careful explanations to his Saxon guests, to Norman knight and even to wandering Jew; gauntlets are flung down, deadly insults hurled from lips pale with rage, trumpets raised to bray to the cloud-piled skies; the earth rumbles under the hooves of chargers in the joust; arrows fly as thick as grass from the mower’s blades; bodies plunge off battlements into moats; swords clang on shields, which sound like dustbin lids. Ivanhoe is properly athletic and well-motivated but a silly ass over women.

A thousand plush seats have hiccups as two thousand buttocks ascend a few inches nearer heaven. If you reach the back aisle before the drum-roll you can carry on to the exit without convicting yourself of treason. If you are caught amongst the seats you must stand riveted amongst them, arms like pokers at your sides. Go-o-od save the Queen. All right, you can go now. The royal countenance is obliterated by sumptuous curtains and American jive steps sharp on the heels of Britain’s most-played tune.

‘How’d you like it, Lena?’

‘Oh, it was all right. But I like Abbott and Costello better.’

We stand in a queue for the bus. We stand on the bus. There is one nice-looking girl, fair, self-contained, a little like Sheila. We alight: Lena walks on ahead while I queue again for fish and chips. When I reach the flat she has laid the table and put the kettle on for my cup of tea. She has taken her hat off and is carving bread in the terrifying female manner with the loaf pressed against her beflowered bust and the knife held as Lucretia holds hers in the Titian. A wisp of grey hair has come adrift from its clips and as she pauses to brush it out of her eyes I feel a pang of tenderness for her deeper than any I have felt for my mother all day long. The kettle lid starts rattling and I go out to the scullery to make the tea. Lena Braidman. To my parents she is merely the spinster sister of one of the sidesmen at Malderbury. To her neighbours in Pennywort Road, that queer old girl at 96, has a nice-looking young lodger, seems a bit too friendly with him too, goes to the pictures with him regular, rum goings on. To Denny, if he happened to see her, that old bag …

‘What time do you want to be called in the morning?’ she asks.

‘I’d better leave here about eight. I have to be at Kensington air-terminal at nine-ten.’ I open a bottle of stout with my penknife. I fill the glass too rapidly and the froth rising with a slow but implacable ebullience passes the brim and slides down the outside to the cloth. ‘Oh, blast … Are you coming with me?’

‘Of course.’ She has unwrapped the fish; she screws the paper into a greasy ball and throws it into the coal-scuttle. ‘I’m going to miss you, Mr. Joyce.’

I scrape a good helping of chips off the dish onto my plate. Got to say it somehow. ‘I’m going to miss you, too, Lena. You’ve been like a—well, like a jolly good Aunt to me all these years.’ She cascades the rest of the chips onto her own plate, takes the smaller piece of fish and hands me the other. Then she begins to saturate her plateful with vinegar. ‘The bit I liked best was when Elizabeth Taylor was listening behind the curtain,’ she says. ‘I think Elizabeth Taylor’s a lovely girl, don’t you?’

‘Not half,’ I reply with relief. ‘If ever I get knocked off a horse with a ten-foot bargepole, I hope Elizabeth Taylor’s around to hand me the smelling salts.’

The washing-up done, I call ‘Goodnight’ to Lena and go to the back bedroom which has been mine ever since I came to London to seek my fortune. It looks bare tonight. The books, the portraits of sailing ships and speedway riders which used to adorn the walls, the two Negro carvings Andy gave me, the radio set I built myself, have all been removed to Malderbury. My remaining belongings are already packed in the two new suitcases standing by the wall. Only unpacked items: my pyjamas on the bed, the suit I’m going to wear tomorrow behind the door, my toilet articles on the dressing-table and washstand. I go through the drawers for a last quick check-up. Empty. Empty. Empty. An odd button, a few tintacks, the top of a broken fountainpen. The sheets of newspaper which were used as linings are all awry and yellowed. End of an epoch. I open the bottom drawer. Here virgins stow their hopes and dreams. What is a virgin bachelor without hopes likely to have put there?

I had expected it to be empty too but it isn’t. There’s an old exercise book. I recognize it with a shock. My novel. The one I started to write immediately after the Sheila episode. Begun in bitterness and ended in frustration. What in hell am I going to do with the thing now?

The title page is elaborately designed in Indian ink:
‘Perfidy
, by Reginald Ernest Joyce.’ On the next page there is a Note: ‘This is a novel, and all the characters are fictitious. Any likeness …’ Etc. Etc. Blah blah blah. What barefaced lying. Who was I hoping to fool? The hero was Reginald Ernest Joyce. The heroine Sheila. The villain Andy. The perfidy Andy’s and Sheila’s.

I read the first few lines. ‘Chapter One. Until I was twenty-seven I was like the Lady of Shalott. I lived in an ivory tower and never looked out of the window: I daren’t. For my knowledge of the world beyond the panes I relied on my mirrors, books. Now anyone who has ever looked over his sweetheart’s shoulder into her mirror as she powders her nose—’

God, what a shock I got that day!

‘—and seen their two faces there, his own no less handsome and frank and open than usual, but hers suddenly strange, with unequal cheeks and lopsided smile, a travesty of her real face (though she appears to be satisfied with it herself, and even derives spiritual strength just from contemplating it), realizes that mirrors do not reflect facts; light travels in straight lines, as is demonstrated to you at school with pins and prisms, but the truth, as Einstein is said to have proved, is slightly bent; and it follows that some of the ideas I had formed in my private chamber were pretty queer. Yet for some of these misconceptions, wrong-headed though they were, I was prepared to lay down my life …’

Plummy writing. Overripe Victorias. Every semi-colon is like a plum-stone in a plum-pie.

‘… One of the strangest notions I had formed (at least it seems one of the strangest now: I left Shalott a year ago) was that there is no such thing as a Bad Woman.’

Etc. etc. etc. I get into bed and read the whole rigmarole. It was written in an unseemly rage, the rage of the jilted lover. It was written too soon after Sheila went off with Andy. In fact I started it while I was recovering from the effects of the barbital. It is the work of a shellshock case. The whole world appeared to me to have been knocked askew and ugly by that one blinding explosion. But it was not the world that was askew, it was the mind that observed it. I can see now how unjust I then was, pretending there was ugliness and bitterness only in days which I now recall again were often ecstatically happy. And so the novel is no novel. It does not re-create the idyll. It is just my outpouring of rage when the idyll broke to fragments in my hands, like a shattered vase. It is the yelping of a kicked dog.

I get out of bed and tear the book into little pieces.

As I finish the kitchen clock goes into the prolonged antepartum travail which can only end in the birth of a chime. One o’clock already. No, twins. Christ, two in the morning. And I have to be up at seven.

I dive under the bedclothes again. The brass knobs at the four points of the compass make their usual cackling protest. Six for a man. Seven for a woman. Eight for a fool. Tonight I’m going to get less than five. And I can usually do with nine. What does that make me, I wonder? A pervert? Or just a lazy sod?

If only one could banish one’s anxieties. Will she be there?

Will she?

And if she isn’t, what matter? Half the human beings in the world are female. The breed is produced by the busload. Billions of the bitches. And every one stamped in the same press. Rigged on the same jigs. That sounds slightly suggestive, but Thou knowest what I mean, O Lord.

I ought to try counting sheep. But being me I can only count women.

Those tarts in Denny’s car. The one in red certainly had a pair of humdingers. Like coconuts. Soon to be brimming with milk. The one in yellow wasn’t bad either. More restrained of course, but—but Addison makes his points no less tellingly than Carlyle. More tellingly, perhaps, in the long run …

Oh, Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. Lying there moaning in the heather. My hand on your heart. My hand under your head. The odour of your hair and skin, as sweet as the heather. Your tense repeated cry: ‘No, Reggie, no. Don’t do anything we’ll regret—please.’

I got up and walked stiffly twenty feet away. I leaned against a damned great boulder, staring over bracken that basked in the heat to the sweeping blue smear of the distant sea. I shouldn’t have been so soft. In fact, I was a fool. I let her appeal to the Ivanhoe in me, the medieval Sahib.

The dream has a different me for hero.

Lena gives me a knock but there’s no need. I’ve been uneasily awake for an hour. Now the crisis is definitely upon me. I throw aside the bedclothes and sit up. The sky outside the window is low and grey. Poor flying weather. Possibly dangerous. I turn, shamefacedly, onto my knees. I adopt the posture of the Moslem as he kneels to face Mecca, burying my head in the pillow. I am not a Moslem any more than I am a Christian; I am in fact non-religious, except when I am afraid, or when I want events to take a certain course. Then I pray. I always despise myself for praying: I should be more self-reliant. But here I am on my knees. Head down I feel more self-abased. Head down I feel I am adopting a more courteous attitude to the God one normally never thinks of, but who may be there …

‘O God I pray Thee, I mean You’ (I despise these pulpit archaisms) ‘make me strong to face the perplexities of this day. I’ve never flown before: but what’s the point of telling You that, if You’re omniscient? And if You aren’t, it’s no good praying to You anyway.’ I sit up exasperated but on second thoughts burrow down again. ‘And if Sheila comes to the airport today, give me strength to face her like a man. And if she doesn’t come, still give me strength: I’ll need it.’ I pause for a moment. ‘Bless—no, that’s silly. Look after Mother and Dad, and Andy, too.’ More often I’ve commended him to the devil of late, but I don’t want to die, if the plane crashes, hating any mortal soul, least of all perhaps the elder brother I once worshipped. ‘Look after poor old Lena and send her a new lodger as soon as You can; she’s going to feel the pinch when I’ve gone, as of course You know.’ Another pause. ‘Bless Sheila. Protect her from all harm. Make her happy with Andy. If that is Your will, of course. Amen.’

Do I feel any better for—for throwing my burdens on the Lord, as my Father would put it? Frankly, no.

‘Are you coming, Mr. Joyce?’

‘Yes, Lena. Just going to shave.’

She is at the air-terminal before we are. As the taxi swerves in a half-circle across the street Lena cries, ‘There she is, in the doorway.’ My heart feels as if it has been plucked out of its ribcage and hurled full force against a brick wall. I look towards the great square porch but what with the taxi swinging round to a halt and the multitudes of skirts and trousers clotting into a frieze before eyeballs dazed with fear … I busy myself opening the door and holding it while Lena alights, lifting my luggage from beside the driver to the pavement, fumbling for the fare in my pocket. I drop a two-bob bit and have to stoop and reach under the taxi, a typical gaucherie; it fills me with fury; it seems I never can act grown-up under Sheila’s eyes.

‘My word, aren’t we smart this morning?’ Her voice is unflinchingly clear and authentic at my shoulder as I rise. ‘Riding around in taxis. And all these new bags too. Those on the pavement and those on the person. That suit really suits you, Reggie. You look more handsome than ever.’

My mouth opens and then it shuts, but no sound emerges. Cold and sharp and clear, like frost on a fallen leaf. Just as in the old days. But she’s gabbling a little too much. The flippancy’s forced.
She’s
frightened too.

Lena says, ‘You’re looking wonderfully well yourself, Mrs. Joyce. That costume is really beautiful.’

‘Thanks, guv,’ says the taxi-driver. So I can’t be preoccupied with him any more. I turn to face her.

‘Don’t you think her dress is lovely, Mr. Joyce?’ Lena’s face is bright with happiness because her high hopes have been justified; merely by coming here Sheila has indicated (Lena supposes) that she thinks more of me than I in my self-distrust thought possible.

I’ve got to say something. I still find it hard to focus my eyes on her. There are her face and that dress and her silk-stockinged legs and her blonde hair done up in a new way but I still can’t see them clear because of the layers of memories, all those months of desire, all those months of defeat, my boyhood veneration for Andy turned to hatred, and that night—that night when willingly and in peace I died by my own hand—coming between her and me. ‘It’s all right,’ I gulp at last. ‘But it looks—baggy.’ The word is the first that comes. I suppose it derives from her own pun on bags. It sounds dreadfully crude. I see her recoil. I add hastily, trying to make amends, ‘I mean, it makes you look—fatter.’

Lena gives me a reproachful glare—something she has never done before in all the six years of our fellowship—and takes Sheila’s arm with a sudden companionable gesture which says more plainly than words, Don’t mind him, he’s male and impossible.