Saint Jack (7 page)

Then Leigh walked in.

I heard Gopi's characteristic trampling of the cobbled path in the garden, his whisper, and Leigh's, “Ah, yes, here we are,” and my heart quickened.

“Long time no see,” said Yardley.

Leigh brightened; but Yardley was beckoning to Gopi and ordering Gopi a drink. “How you doing?” said Yardley, putting his arm around the
peon.

“
There
you are,” said Leigh. I winced at the demonstration of pretended relief. Leigh glanced at the others and said, “'d evening” and “M'ellew.”

“Go on,” said Yardley, “drink up! There's a good chap.”

Gopi had a whiskey in his hand. He drank it all and at once his eyes glazed, his face went ashen and matched his caste mark.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Gopi, don't drink if you're not in the mood.”

“He's going to be sick,” said Coony.

“I like this little chap's company,” said Yardley. It was his revenge on Leigh. “Have another one?”

Gopi nodded, but he was not saying yes. He covered his face with a hanky and pedaled to the door. Outside, in the garden, he became loud, hawking and spitting.

“The call of the East,” said Smale.

Gopi groaned, and dragged himself away.

“That was mighty nice of you,” I said to Yardley.

“He'll be all right,” Yardley muttered, and turned away, saying, “Now, where was I?” to Frogget and Smale.

“How are you doing?” asked Leigh.

“Anyone I can,” I said.

“That clerk of yours very kindly showed me the way here. Poor chap's got a sort of gammy leg, hasn't he, and I was a bit sorry he had to—” Leigh was still talking about Gopi's lameness, but he was not looking me in the eye. He stared at my tattoos, the ones on my left arm, and in particular at the long blue crucifix crowned with a circle of thorns dripping inverted commas of blood onto my wrist. I pressed my right to my side as soon as I saw him fasten on the left.

“He's a wonderful feller,” I said. “Minds his own business.” I reached for my drink and when I lifted it his gaze lifted until it met my own. He looked tired. He had been hard at work all day, probably sitting in that low chair in Hing's office, out of range of the fan's blowing, while Hing looked on and slapped at papers on his desk. Leigh's eyes were watery and his hair was stuck to his head with sweat; the floridness of his face, which had looked like ruddy good health the day before, was not a solid color, but rather many little veins and splotches. I looked at him as at a picture in a newspaper that goes insubstantial with closeness, the face blurred to a snowfall of dots.

“How do the accounts look?” I asked, handing Leigh a tumbler of gin.

“Bit ropey,” said Leigh. “Any of the pink stuff?”

Wally shook some drops of Angostura into the gin.

“That'll put lead in your pencil,” I said.

“Best to put it in the glass before the gin and work it around the sides,” said Leigh. He wrapped the glass in his hanky, said, “Cheers,” and drank.

“I don't mind telling him to get knotted,” Yardley was saying.

“Bit ropey,” Leigh repeated, smacking his lips. “We'll sort it out, though if you ask me, your
towkay
's missing a few beads from his abacus.”

“He'll drive you out of your gourd,” I said.

“Funny little thing, isn't he? I can't understand a word he says.”

“What about your
towkay
—in Hong Kong?” I asked.

“Him!” Leigh gathered his features solemnly together and said, “In actual fact . . . he's a cunt.”

Yardley heard and smiled, and I wondered for a moment whether the obscenity would redeem Leigh. It didn't. Yardley continued to talk to the fellers on my right, and sometimes to me; Leigh spoke only to me. I was, awkwardly, in the middle, a zone of good humor. There was no way out of it; to skip off with Leigh would mean the end of my drinking at the Bandung; the desertion would prohibit my return. Soon Yardley was saying less and less to me, and Leigh growing quite talkative on his third drink.

“—God, sometimes I hate it,” Leigh said. “One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City. The call of the East indeed—your friend over there was right. That fantastic hoicking puts me off my food, it really does. Still, it won't be much longer.”

“How long do you plan to stay in Hong Kong?”

“My dear fellow,” said Leigh, “not a moment longer than is absolutely necessary.”

In different words, for fourteen years I'd said the same thing to myself; it was an ambiguous promise, and when I said it, it sounded like never. But Leigh's sounded like soon.

“Margaret—my wife—Margaret's got a magnificent cottage picked out. In Wiltshire—you know it? Fantastic place. When I go all broody about the Chinese, Margaret looks at me and says, ‘We're halfway to Elmview'—that's the name of the cottage. That cheers me up. And then I don't feel so bad about—”

The name depressed me; it sounded like the name of an old folks' home, and I imagined an overheated parlor, a radio playing too loud, an elderly inmate snoring in an armchair, another in a frilly apron busying himself with a dustpan and brush, and a young heavy nurse patiently feeding a protesting crone who was wearing a blue plastic bib and batting the spoon away with her hand. Just saying the name lifted Leigh's spirits; he was still talking about the cottage.

“—thought of doing a little book about my experiences. Call it
Hong Kong Jottings
and pack it with sampans and chatter from the club, that sort of thing. I see myself at Elmview on a spring morning, in the front room, sun splashing through the window, working on this book. In longhand, of course. Outside I can see masses of bluebells and a green meadow.” He sighed. “An old horse out to pasture.”

“It sounds—” I could not think of another way of saying it—“very agreeable.”

“You know,” he said, “I've never set foot in that cottage. I saw it from a motorcar; Margaret pointed it out from the road. It was raining. We had a ploughman's lunch in the village—beautiful old pub—and went back to London that same afternoon. But it's as if I've been living there my whole life. I can tell you the position of every stick of furniture, every plate, how the sun strikes the carpet. I can see the tea things arranged on the table, and there's that—” he sniffed—“curious stale smell of cold ashes in the grate.”

Yardley used to say, “Everyone in the tropics has a funkhole,” and Leigh had told me his; his description had taken the curse off the name—the place was happy, a credible refuge. I had my own plans. I had never told a soul; I had kept my imaginings to myself and added little details now and then over the years. Maybe I had had one gin too many, or it might have been my triumphant feeling over that Bishop Bradley business. Whatever it was—it might have been Leigh's candor magnetizing mine—I drew very close to him and whispered, “It's an odd thing, isn't it? Everyone imagines a different funkhole. Take mine, for example. You know what I want?”

“Tell me,” said Leigh, sympathetically.

“First, I want a lot of money—people don't laugh at a feller with dough. Then I want a yacht that you can sleep on and a huge mansion with a fence or a wall around it and maybe a peacock in the garden. I'd like to walk around all day in silk pajamas, and take up golf and give up these stinking cheroots and start smoking real Havana cigars. And that's not all—”

Leigh gave me an awfully shocked look; it rattled me so badly I stuttered to a halt and finished my drink in a single gulp. He thought I was mocking him. The dream of mine, the little glimpse of fantasy that had widened into the whole possible picture I saw every day I spent on that island, saving my sanity as I obeyed Hing or turned my girls out or sorted pornographic pictures on the kitchen table in my house in Moulmein Green, hopeful and comforting in its detail, making me resourceful—that to him was mockery.

He said, “Are you taking the mickey out of me?”

There was no way I could explain that I was perfectly serious. I saw it all coming to me quickly, like a jackpot I imagined myself winning: “Just a minute,” I would say to the fellers at the bar, and while everyone watched I would put a coin—say my last—into a one-arm bandit, yank the lever and watch the whirr become a row of stars as the machine exploded and roared, disgorging a shower of silver dollars.

An old horse out to pasture
, he had said; I had not giggled—at that or the bluebells. I believed it because he did. But my version of Elmview, my own funkhole (deep-sea fishing in a silk robe and a velvet fedora, with a cigar in my teeth) made him mad. And what bothered me most was that I could not tell whether he felt mocked because my imaginings were grander than his or because they sounded absurd and he doubted them. I would not have minded his envy, but his doubt would have made my whole plan seem inaccessible to me by encouraging my own doubt.

His grim expression made me say what I at once regretted: “I guess it sounds pretty crazy.”

He did not hear me. Behind me, Yardley was horsing around, bawling a joke: “
‘Organ,'
she says.
‘That's
no organ, breh-heh! Looks more like a
flute
to me!'”

“I take it Singapore's not a terribly expensive place to live,” said Leigh.

“That's a laugh,” I said. “It's probably more expensive than Hong Kong!”

“I'm quite surprised,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. He took a sip of his drink. “Then the salaries here aren't very, um, realistic.”

“They're not too bad,” I said. I even laughed a little bit. But I stopped laughing when I saw what he was driving at. “You mean Hing?”

He nodded and gave me the tight rewarded smile of a man who has just tasted something he likes. He said, “You've got an
amah
's salary.”

“You've got the wrong end of the stick,” I said. “If you think I bank on—” But I was ashamed, and flustered—and angry because he still wore that smile. He had spent the day in that upstairs cubicle examining my salary. What could I say? That Gunstone had a few hours before thanked me with an envelope of cash? That I was welcome in any club in Singapore, and was snooker champion of one (unbeaten on the table at the Island Club), and knew a sultan who called me Jack and who had introduced me as his friend to Edmund de Rothschild at a party? That once, on Kampong Java Road, where I had my own brothel, I cleared a couple of thousand after pilferage and breakage was settled? That Edwin Shuck of the American embassy had told me that if it had not been for me Singapore would never have been used as a base for the GIs' “R and R” and Paradise Gardens would not have existed? That I had
plans?

I hated him most when he said, with a concern that was contemptuous patronage, “How do you manage?”

My elbows were on the bar, my head in my hands. Far off on a green ocean I saw a yacht speeding toward me with its pennants snapping in the breeze. A man in a swivel chair on the afterdeck had his feet braced on the gunwales and was pulling at a bending rod. Just behind him a lovely girl in a swimsuit stood with a tray of drinks and—I knew—club sandwiches, fresh olives, dishes of rollmop herring, and caviar spread on yellow crackers. The fish leaped, a tall silver thing turning in the sun, whipping the line out of the water. The yacht was close and I could see the man now. It was not me; it was no one I knew. I released my fingers from my eyes.

“Flowers,” said Leigh. Why was he smiling? “How about a drink at the club?”

My girls were fairly well known at the Bandung—“Jack's fruit flies,” Yardley called them—but no one there had any knowledge of my club work, and how I came straight from the Churchill Room or the Raffles Grill to the Bandung like an unfaithful husband home from his beguiling mistress's arms. I tried to whisper, “Maybe later.”

Leigh looked beyond me to the others. “Does this establishment,” he said, “have a toilet?”

“In the kitchen,” said Coony, glad for a chance to say it.

Wally pointed the way.

“Does this establishment have a toilet?” said Smale. He guffawed. I wondered if Leigh could hear.

“Calls it a toilet,” said Yardley. “He knows it's a crapper, but he calls it a toilet. That's breeding, you understand.”

Frogget went yuck-yuck.

“What's this club he's talking about?” asked Yardley suspiciously.

I said I didn't have the remotest idea.

“You sound more like him every day,” said Yardley.

“Knock it off,” I said.

“Don't be narked,” said Smale. “He's your mate, ain't he?”

“He hasn't bought anyone a drink yet,” said Coony. “I could tell he was a mean bastard.”

“Did you hear him rabbiting on?” asked Smale.

“I liked the part about him having tea in the pasture,” said Frogget. “That shows he's around the twist.”

They had heard. They had been talking the whole time but they had caught what Leigh had said about Elmview—a distorted version of it. I had whispered, confiding my hopes; they could not have heard me. But why had I weakened and told Leigh? And who would
he
tell? He was out of the room; I wanted him to stay out, never to come back, and for his engine to gripe and stop his mouth.

“He's a pain in the neck,” I said, at last.

“Been in the bog a little while,” said Smale. “What do you suppose he's doing in there?”

“Probably tossing himself off,” said Frogget.

“You're a delicate little feller,” I said.

No one said anything for a little while, but it was not what I had said to Frogget that caused the silence. We were waiting for the flush, which you could hear in the bar. The only sounds were the fans on the ceiling and the murmuring of Wally's transistor. We were drinking without speaking, and looking around in the way fellers do when they have just come into a bar; Leigh might have crept back without pulling the chain.