Key to the Door (43 page)

He ate his food slowly, drank tea, only half-aware of the squabble going on between Maureen and Doris, the eldest daughter, who was to be married in a month and seemed to be getting her bellyful of family fights before leaving them off for good. Mullinder switched the news on hopefully, but it didn't get a look in, so with a pit curse—also drowned—he flicked it off again. I don't know how he puts up with this racket, though maybe he likes it—you never know. It's certainly a living family. If there was an argument like this in our house, fists and pots would be flying already. Pauline sat opposite, eating her supper. She caught his look and picked up her cup of tea to dispel it. He was overwhelmed by an impossible thought, an outlandish idea that would drag him from all settled notions of work and courting (and freedom that nevertheless existed between the two states) and set him on a course so new and head-racking, yet in a way perhaps wonderful and good, that he wished the vision of it had never fixed itself like a hot picture-transfer against his skin. Maybe she already is pregnant, he thought, we've done it often enough.

CHAPTER 21

Seven hours gone, and seven to go: it was a long watch, two workdays wrapped up in the parcel of one black night. The air in the hut had left off being air and turned to sweat. Talk about dead-beat! This is what trade unions is good for, but they're all verboten in this Belsen. He screwed up his eyes so that they opened wide when the pressure of his knuckles lifted, adjusted a few of the dozen dials to get spot-on frequency, and tapped out a legible two-letter call-sign KB KB KB—more to fill his own earphones with a companionable noise than drag other and distant operators from their stolen half-burnt slumber. The morse lacked energy, like his eyes and mind. Singapore was silent down the steps of latitude: Saigon, Karachi, Negombo—meaningless ghosts beyond the periphery of consciousness. He wrote his call in the log: half-past three, wanting five hours still to be back in camp and under the sluicing cold bite of a shower. Most of all, he wanted the bullock cart of the year to take off its brakes and roll quickly into next week, for he and Knotman had formed a jungle-rescue team and arranged that its initial exercise be an attempt to climb Gunong Barat from the south. He'd done weeks of work, had drafted charts to show how the grub-tins and biscuits would be divided between the six donkey-backs of the team, and had already plotted each night's camping position on a three-inch map he'd spent a week drawing in the camp library. “Planning the trip'll be the easiest part of it,” Knotman said. “Don't bank on three miles a day. Make it two.” I suppose he should know, Brian thought. Even so, we'll do more than two: I could go that far on my head. At Transmitters the wireless mechanic was breathing life into a walkie-talkie, and Brian had more overlapping maps to sketch and trace, and would have to queue in a day or two for injections against typhus and typhoid. Camp monotony was broken, a thing of the past—and as a team ever after they could be called on to trek and search for the survivors of any kite that belly-dived in the north Malayan jungle.

A month ago he had gone by air-sea-rescue pinnace as relief sparks to a buoy-laying scheme off the Barat coast. The pinnace made tracks like a well-polished beetle around tiny jungle islands, while Brian's morse kept a couple of rusty and worn-out naval tugs in touch with Kota Libis. There were few messages to send, and he spent most of the day on deck, reading by the donkey engine. At night the pinnace was moored a few yards out from an island, a half-sphere of grapefruit jungle with no more than six feet of sand for a beach. He did anchor-watch, and looking down in the darkness, there was nothing in the sea but grey humps of giant jellyfish, stationary and sinister below the surface as if waiting for a sleep-laden inhabitant of the boat to lose his footing and provide a meal for them. Now and again he swung the leadweight, sounding fathoms to make sure the boat didn't drag its anchor. At seven he watched the sun feeling its way up the jungle of Gunong Barat, showing him at this close range secret valleys and subsidiary hilltops invisible from the camp, and coastal knolls coming almost down to the still night-laden sea. The sun poured yellow fire on to each pinnacle and dyed the greyish villages red as if they were in some nightmare waterless land of iron ore, then hardened to a purple and crimson. Yellow grew out it, came towards green, until the sun broke through its barrier and slowly turned the water around the pinnace into a sea of blood.

He slung down his pencil, restless from the memory of that fabulous dawn, felt feverish in the dank tobacco-soaked air on which insects seemed content to draw their calories of existence. Kicking open the door, he smelled the warm stillness of the tiger-night, took up the rifle and walked outside, feeling the tall brittle blades of elephant grass chafing his knees as he made his way slowly towards the far wall of trees. I hope I don't put my foot on a snake, he thought, going slower so as to give any comfortably curled-up krait or cobra time to make its getaway. Half a mile off was an open shed in which an airman armed with a wooden club was set to guard petrol and tools. A few nights ago, Brian reminded himself, the poor sod had seen the face of a full-grown tomcat tiger gimletting from tall grass outside. With no doors to hold it back should the tiger roam around, he nearly curled up and died at the shock, but was able to use the field telephone and explain with garbled obscenity to some officer at the mess that they'd better come and get him before he was chewed to bone and gristle. Half an hour later a jeep of drunken officers roared up the runway firing Stens—by which time the tiger was safe in its hide-out jungle.

Maybe I'll meet that tiger: he slid a bullet up the spout. My claws are as sharp as his while I've got this .303 in my fist. The fear livened him and he walked on, though slowly, as if a cord were tied to his feet. The grass moved, bent into a hollow. He peered and saw nothing, a shadow of wind perhaps, though his .303 burst against it, sending a hemisphere of deafening noise shaking towards the hills.

Back in the hut, he switched the tuning dial from its allotted wave-length to find some music, hoping no plane would choose to send an SOS while he wasn't listening. The needle flickered across graduated readings behind the glass, settled on a station whose music he eventually recognized (able to follow the tune, though static made mincemeat of crotchets and semi-quavers) as Bizet's “L'Arlésienne Suite.” He remembered hearing it first when he was fourteen, alone in the house as it played in the interval of Daudet's play, the same music now wavily crossing the Pacific. The sad melody had haunted him ever since, bringing sharply before his eyes the vision of a sun going down over the flat grey land of the Camargue, where the air is cool and still to the insane cry of someone dying of love.

When the first hearing of the music finished, he was in tears, a shameless unfair desecration of his working manhood. It was an evening in summer before the advent of darkness, when children had stopped screaming along the asphalt path by the lavatories, and the group of women who normally gossiped at the yard-end had gone in to give them their teas. No anti-aircraft guns belted away at illusive aeroplanes and no sirens wailed their warning song. It was the dead hour between tea and supper, light and dark, between the end of barking dogs and the start of lad-gangs calling at passing girls from unlit lamp-posts. The feeling of poetry and death was broken as his mother said, having suddenly walked in: “What's up, Brian? You're never crying, are you?”

“No,” he answered. “The sun hurt my eyes today when I was out up Trent.”

The same music came to him now, in places distorted or impossible to hear, so that he tried to tune it clearer, using all his skill to bring it free from the murderous inundations of atmospherics. He allied himself to the music, related it to the workings of his own brain. In the enervating damp heat of Malaya, both thought and action took place in a kind of haze, and he sensed strongly that his mind could be far deeper and sharper than it was. The only practical way, it seemed, of reaching this occasionally perceived and ideal state in the near future was to get back to England, for he imagined that in a colder and clearer temperature his thoughts and perceptions would deepen and increase.

He glimpsed it now, but vaguely, because the music confused him with self-pity, reminding him that no letter from Pauline had come for a fortnight, and no news from Mimi either; and he couldn't envisage a future beyond the dark escarpments of Gunong Barat.

He hadn't seen Mimi for several weeks, in fact, and through the hard and alternating watches (increased day-work because bombers patrolled the jungle on square-searches, termed exercise) he pondered on specific reasons for it. The widow, she said, had been told of his visits and threatened to throw her out if he came there again because she didn't like English airmen invading the sacred territory of her house. Or is Mimi making this up to put me off? There was no way of knowing, and brooding gets you nowhere. Sooner or later the good things end, your troubles start. Only for so long can you think the world is a lovely place to be in, until with a couple of mild hits between the eyes it reminds you that you don't count as to whether it's good or not. Some invisible thug takes you by the shoulders and shakes you this way and that, roaring all the time: “You're alive, you stiff-necked jumped-up bastard. You're alive, I'm telling you. And here's summat to let you know it.” You're left tottering, trying to see what's wrong and put things right, when underneath all you want to do is crawl away and sleep while the trouble and bother works itself out—die, in other words. I should have known things would go this way with us, but that's the trouble about being slow on the uptake, because I didn't do anything to stop the rot setting in.

Her silence hit him like a double hammerblow of optimism and despair, a carpenter's pendulum to stop you doing anything, yet keep you living. Where do you go from the highest point of passion? To sustain it into love would have meant seeing her more often, which, because he was a prisoner, was impossible. He reached the agony of believing that perhaps he had wanted the break to come, because the toil and emotional fight needed to sustain what he may have imagined to be there in the first place was too much for his diminishing energy in the blood-boiling north of Malaya. Maybe she just doesn't want to see me and that's that.

Granted that what the eye didn't see the heart couldn't grieve, he realized he was nevertheless doing the dirty of the rottenest sort on Pauline, thought of her often from his far-removed and new-cut stomping grounds of Kota Libis, knowing that while opportunity offered he hadn't the will to do more or less than accept it. He had neither felt nor heard any angel of moral injury on his silent expeditions through the Patani darkness and swamps to see Mimi, and as long as he didn't wonder whether or not Pauline was playing the same trick on him, he hardly thought to explore the unfaithful pointers of his own actions. But he was eventually pushed into considering such a possibility when the idea that Mimi could be betraying
him
crept into his mind. And this was such an enraging idea that he forgot about his injury to Pauline (and maybe hers to him) as soon as it was broached, detesting Mimi for a betrayal he could never have proof of.

Mimi was strange to him because her one-sided character appeared so complete. Her chief trait seemed one of a lassitude so overpowering that his only reaction to it was anger. He saw no way in which they could really and finally meet in love, his immediate dark reason for this being that they were too much strangers to each other, having been born and reared in different parts of the world. I understood Pauline, he told himself, so why shouldn't I get through to Mimi? Still, some women are harder to get to know than others—and don't I know it?—for I was four years with Pauline before we had to run down to the Registry Office and get spliced up. Mimi is too passive, and I want somebody to grind myself to bits on maybe. Don't be a loon: all you want is to shag yourself silly, you know you do; what brains you've got dive overboard as soon as you get a woman hot and undressed in bed. Mimi's doing it on you, and it's looped your vanity in a half-nelson. You thought you were all set to make a go of it, live it up for good perhaps, get married maybe (after you'd ditched Pauline, you foul bastard), and fill her with a few kids. Well, think on it: you'll be back in England in six months and then where will you be with all this humming and aahing? Who knows where I'll be in six months? I could walk away from this wireless set, tread on a snake outside the door, and be dead before I knew where I was. So all that crap about the future wain't wash; except I suppose I'll be back in England soon and loving it up with marvellous understandable Pauline.

Life on the camp was boring between morse and map-making. Twenty-five dollars a week at eight to the pound was only enough to keep him in cigarettes and odd meals at the canteen, so he couldn't dazzle himself with the expensive lights of Palau Timur more than once a month. No wonder Mimi's fed up with me, he reasoned. If dad could send me a few quid every week—like some blokes get—I'd be able to jazz things up a bit. The poor bogger needs every penny for himself, even though he is at work. I don't expect the couple o' bob a day I allow Pauline would make much difference to my whooping it up either, because she could do with it, as well as the odd food parcel I'm able to post off now and again.

The camp cinema had been six weeks closed because the rickety equipment had given out. It was so old they must have got it from the scrap-heap outside some shut-down flea-pit. You could go, of course, to the Nanking Talkies in the village, but it was a dead loss hearing Rin-Tin-Tin barking in Chinese and the man on Movietone News ringing his bell in Hindustani three months out of date, and seeing joss-smoke billowing from Buck Jones's ivory-handled guns. So he'd sit in the billet, reading for hour after hour until his concentration snapped and he was ready to argue with anyone who happened to be about. No one believed in God, he found, and most would vote Labour if they were old enough. Getting them to admit a monarchy useless proved easy, and from then on, it wanted only half an hour to win them over to a form of Communism terrifying in its simplicity. At the apogee of his boredom he found himself possessed by a wild and compelling gift of the gab, would sit on the end of his bed and talk talk talk on any subject that came into his head, spouting without effort and only realizing afterwards that the boys had actually been listening with enjoyment, had been influenced by his voice, laughing when he said something amusing and nodding in agreement when he came out with the extreme breath of revolution. They'll believe anything when they're bored, he saw, exhausted from his peroration, pleased at himself as he fell asleep over his book.