Key to the Door (55 page)

“Enough?”

“Plenty, sir.”

He turned to go: “If you want anything, phone me at the control tower. I'll be there for the night.”

Brian watched them drive off. It was the first time an orderly officer had thought to call that far from the bar at the officers' mess. Maybe they are bothered whether I get shot after all. Tiredness rushed back, ached into his eyes like creosote. I don't care if all the Communists of the world are creeping up on my hut to burn it to the ground, or if all the kites above Malaya are getting sore throats sending SOS's: I'm dead-beat. He lowered the volume of the receiver, stretched out on the bed, and fell into a deep sleep till daylight.

He read every newspaper from front page to last, hoping to discover how the “war” was progressing. A so-called “state of emergency” brought in martial law, and he noted with some confusion the fact that he was part of it. Because others in the camp were also mixed up, a civilian education officer came from Singapore to give a lecture on the political situation. He was a thin, dried-out man of middle-age wearing an immaculate flower-blue shirt and beige trousers, a deliberate touch of informality that would endear him more to his khaki-drilled audience. The same talk, called “British Achievements in Malaya,” had been given at every camp along the line, so by the time he reached Kota Libis he was practised and adept in his delivery, the marked set of his jaw and his steel-blue eyes somehow dividing his personality between severity on the one hand, and final disbelief in his own words on the other. Even if what he said didn't seem convincing to himself, he was a gifted enough speaker to make it appear so to the more simple of his listeners. The NAAFI canteen was filled with those who had come to hear him spout on the official view of the Malayan rebellion, and after the station adjutant had spoken a few words by way of introduction, the first twenty minutes of his address were an account of how the British had acquired Malaya, how they had rid it of disease and laid a superlative system of communication, pushed back the ravaging waves of the jungle and brought rubber into the country. He then came to the present day:

“War was declared, in a manner of speaking,” he said, “on June 15th. An emergency meeting of a hundred Perak rubber-estate managers took place at Ipoh, and it was decided then and there to ask Sir Edward Ghent (the High Commissioner, as you all know) to declare a state of emergency because of widespread outbreaks of lawlessness. For this lawlessness the planters blamed the weakness of civil government, as well as Communist political agitators, who were also behind the murders that were beginning to sweep the rest of the peninsula.

“It was about this time that the Cornish manager of a tin mine near Ipoh was shot dead while paying his employees, and robbed of two thousand four hundred dollars.” [“And ten thousand people starved that month,” someone near Brian said.] “The
Straits Times
also reported that three British rubber planters were murdered near Ipoh. They were captured by Chinese Communists armed with Sten guns, tied to chairs, and riddled with bullets. All European families were ordered to evacuate the area at once, though only a few would do so. A law was passed securing capital punishment for illegal possession of firearms” [It's like a law being passed in 1939 making it criminal for the Jerries to have guns, Brian thought] “a law which, while necessary from a legal point of view, made little if any difference to the gathering wave of war coming out of the jungle. In such a country as this a few thousand men, resourceful and determined, can hold out for a long time, inflicting far more damage and casualties than they would sustain themselves, at first. Reinforcements come in constantly from South China, moving by secret jungle routes through Indo-China and Siam. British subjects in Malaya are now living under hard and dangerous conditions. Their bungalows—as most of you may well know—are turned into miniature fortresses, outposts on the edge of the jungle, guarded day and night, surrounded with barbed wire and sandbags. The planters carry on their work armed with rifles and sub-machine-guns, and these men and their families are showing the usual British obduracy under such difficult circumstances, an obduracy always unexpected by their enemies. The Communists had hoped for a concerted rush for the boats at Penang and Singapore, but they were disappointed.

“However, we mustn't underestimate this Communist threat to Malaya. They possess a highly efficient, well-organized, and strictly disciplined army, moving in battle formation and receiving orders from well-equipped and well-camouflaged headquarters, staffed by experienced officers. Their idea is to strangle Malaya's rubber production, to render the country a dead loss economically, and destroy the conditions of civilization built up patiently by the British during the last hundred and fifty years.

“Effective measures are being taken to meet this menace.…”

Awkward questions came at the end, such as: “Since this looks like a popular uprising, wouldn't it be better for the British to clear out before too much blood is shed?” And: “Would it be so bad to the British economy if Malaya was lost?” The lecturer answered with calmness and intelligence, though some noise came from people at the back of the hall who wanted him to know they weren't convinced. A Scottish cook from Glasgow next to Brian said that his MP was a Communist, so wouldn't it be wrong to say that all Communists were evil? “So's mine,” a Londoner said. “Piratin's his name, and my old man voted for him.” The lecture was brought to a close by a few words on the difference between Communists who are elected into power (as in England) and those who try to take a country over by violence against the wishes of the majority (as in Malaya).

Rifles were carried into the billet, locked along a rack with a piece of wire threaded through each trigger-guard. The key to the padlock was kept in the pocket of a corporal who happened to be a heavy sleeper so that Brian wondered how quickly they'd get into action if the camp were rushed one dark and peaceful night. “If he sleeps that deep,” Kirkby said, “maybe we could nick the key and flog the rifles to the bandits. We could all go on a spree then.”

“If you did that, the best thing you could do,” Baker said, “would be to make a getaway over the border to Bangkok.”

“In any case,” someone called to Kirkby, “it'd be stealing”—so that he could only re-state his one rule of existence: “If you see owt moving, screw it. If you can't screw it, sell it. If you can't sell it, set fire to it.”

Brian showered and changed before going to meet Mimi at the Boston Lights, walked cool and spruced-up towards the camp exit. The first stars were out, and spreading palmtops were still silhouetted against dark blue above. Behind came noises from the camp, and he paused at the grass to light a cigarette while a lorry turned from the gate and raced off to the airstrip. Malayan police were on guard, and a few rickshaws were hanging about for fares to the village. A sudden weird noise grew into the air, like some inspired madman trying to play a tune on a wartime siren. It began from down the road, an alien music dominating the quiet fall of a Malayan sunset. Brian's shoulder blades and the tips of his fingers shivered with an unnatural electric coolness, and the wailing came louder through the tunnel of the trees. Other people stopped to see the advent of this monster that progressed towards them on two hundred marching feet, with the head of a dozen pipers making their instruments squeal and wail as they ate into the head and neck of them. “They're Ghurkas,” somebody cried. A group of Malays and Chinese stood by the gate and watched them wheel in: men tramping back from the dead, biting out on their dark flowers of music a tune from the underworld. They formed up between the canteen and billets, pipers still playing as the infantry marked time. The final yell of “Halt”—stopping the rise and fall of their automaton feet like the throw of a switch—seemed to transform the atmosphere of the camp from that of apprehensive gaiety into one of total war.

At the Boston, Brian bought a row of tickets and sat out the dances with Mimi. He got talking about the future and, before he realized his mistake, was too far in to withdraw. “It'd be easy for me to stay out here, instead of going back to England,” he said across the table—obviously at a time when she didn't want to hear such things, when the tin-pot band crashing away close by was determined, it seemed, to override him. Mimi, looking young and pretty and painted up to the nines, pushed her handbag away, then worried it bit by bit back to her stomach, staring straight before her, so that it fell on to her knees: “It would be the hardest thing for you to do. You talk too nice about it. And you know I don't like it as well.”

“Stop nailing me,” he said, draining his thimble-sized whisky. “I only say what I mean.” Her face was blank with sadness (or was it weariness? he wondered), yet he thought a smile lurked somewhere behind her eyes. I'm getting drunk, he said to himself during a smile of tenderness that brought her hand out to touch his wrist.

She said: “Maybe you're afraid to go back to England.” The band, after a pause, slonked out another series of foxtrots, debilitating for all and sundry—yet enjoyed—in the heavy sweat of the evening. “You're dead wrong,” he cried, with such positive conviction that, remembering it later, he wondered whether or not there wasn't some truth in it. She turned her eyes down. “If I don't know my own mind at twenty, I'll never know it,” he said. He called a waiter and asked for two more whiskies, but Mimi insisted on an orange squash. She took only soft drinks whenever their talk got “serious”—whereas he went to the other extreme of whisky, the result being that while his seriousness tended to become more erratic on the loosening fire induced, Mimi grew more and more into her melancholic, fatalistic self—leaving them in the end at emotional loggerheads. At the same time he suspected that no mere earthly decision, such as the one they were trying to solve now, was really vital to her life, which seemed to work on a level where decisions were left—and trusted—to look after themselves, whether you scorched yourself with rice whisky or sat through them with an iced squash. He sensed all this, and the foregone conclusions it implied, yet in the packed dance hall, facing her and having his head pounded out of shape with smash-hits murdered by the Boston Lights Brainwashers, he wasn't so sure he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in the fabulous sunlight of Malaya. “Our demob group was called before the CO today, and quizzed about staying on in the air force another two years. I could always accept.”

“No, you couldn't,” she said. “You don't belong in a uniform. I know something about you after all this time.” Maybe she did, at that. The CO asked if he'd any complaints to make against the air force now that he was (in a month) about to leave. “None, sir,” he answered. Who'd be such a loon as to say he had? “Well,” the CO went on, a set speech made to everybody, “we need all the trained men we can get in Malaya at this difficult time, and according to the signals officer you're one of his best wireless operators. Would you like to stay an extra two years?” This question wasn't unexpected either: Baker had been in before him and came out with a look of insult on his livid face. So Brian had his answer, a telegram already worded in his brain: “No, sir”—a pause—“I wouldn't.” The CO's face, dead but for the handlebar moustache, registered the “I wouldn't.” “You can go then, Seaton,” he rapped out.

“If I signed on,” he said to Mimi, “I might be able to help the Communists.”

She smiled: “They don't want much help at the moment.”

“They might in a few months. You never know.”

“Nearly everybody's on their side in Malaya,” she said.

“I hope they win, then. They've even got their own radio station, haven't they? They try to jam our WT channels with a transmitter. I was told to get a bearing on it yesterday so that our planes could track it down and bomb it, but I didn't get a very accurate one. Far from it,” he laughed.

“This war's nothing to do with you,” she said. “You should get out as quickly as you can.”

“Not much, it ain't. I was dragged into the air force against my will and now they want me to fight the Communists. I'm no mug. I've learned a thing or two in my life. They can fight their wars themselves.” She touched him with her foot: two Chinese were listening from the next table. They turned to their own talk, and he called the waiter for more drinks.

“As I was saying,” he peeled off another day's pay, “I can stay in Malaya if I like.” She looked hard at him, and he knew that, for a change, he was more puzzling to her than she had ever been to him, that she wanted him to act and not involve her in the complex machinery of his decisions. “If I decide to stay in Malaya, we can get married.”

“You can't marry me. You never could, and you know it.”

The whisky, music, voices, and moving colour around their table, a circular light of agonized intimacy created by the opposite poles of their personality (light and dark for him; dark and light for her), mixed into a flood that he bent his head nearer the table to avoid. “You're wrong,” he cried. “For Christ's sake, you're wrong, because I'd like that more than anything.”

She reminded him of something he'd never told her and didn't know she knew: “You've got a wife and child waiting for you in England,” and the shock was so great that no quick lie came to his rescue. He sat with mouth closed and a grim stare in his eyes. “You thought I didn't know!” He was surprised at her treating as flippant a piece of deception that a Radford woman might have choked him for. “I've known for months. I happened to be dancing one night with someone from Kota Libis who told me all about you. I thought you knew I knew. You never bothered to tell me you were married, out of kindness, I imagined.”

“That's true,” he said, a little too quickly, though sensing that the river of gaiety loped around them by the dance hall was coming to the end of its tether, about to lay down its head and die—except that there was no diminution in the machine-like power of the band. Mimi's motionless expression was one of unhappiness, and he felt miserable and guilty that he hadn't kept his trap shut—or at least hadn't opened it in the right way—and spent the six tickets on spinning themselves off their feet.