A Gentle Occupation Read online

  A Gentle Occupation

  A Novel by

  Dirk Bogarde

  This book is for Norah Smallwood, who said, ‘Try …

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  The engines had stopped half an hour ago while he was strapping up his bed-roll, and the ending of the comforting throb and shudder had brought a sudden astonishing silence. He had stuck a finger in his ear, cracked his jaw, shaken his head. The ship had died. A heart-beat stilled. Then feet thudded along the steel deck above, water lapped and swirled, someone came clattering hurriedly down a companionway calling indistinct orders, a metal door slammed and killed the voice. He humped the bed-roll onto the narrow bunk which Weathersby had vacated at first light. One thing he was glad about the trip ending was no more Weathersby. He hadn’t liked him from the moment they had picked him up, halfway down the coast, at Penang. Pasty-faced, small, veined hands, issue-glasses, nervous, dull. He had hardly ever spoken on the rest of the voyage, lost in Forever Amber, until last night when he had left the wardroom with a whispered ‘Goodnight, going to pack …’ and they’d all sighed with relief. Someone said he was like an albatross—but they at least had dignity. Rooke reached up, took his washing-bag and drew the string tight. Above his head ropes hissed and rasped and, as the ship swung gently against the dock, nudging it softly like a flirt, a column of sunlight sprang through the porthole, raking the bulkhead with glittering ripples of reflected water, probing across the rusting bolts and hasty welding of the steel plates; an oval spotlight in a provincial pantomime looking for the Demon King.

  He stuffed the wash-bag, his diary and a full tin of State Express cigarettes into his hold-all, buttoned it firmly and slung it over a shoulder. The ship lurched suddenly as it struck the wooden dockside, and juddered to a final stop. Slowly he traced his finger across the stencilled name faded into the canvas bedroll. How new it had all looked six years ago in the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria. Now soiled and rain-stained, the leather straps scuffed, buckles dulled; a loyal, welcoming companion from Arromanches to Cox’s Bazar. The once bold figures of his rank, name and number fading into the worn buff canvas. Capt. B. A. Rooke. 269237.

  ‘You must call him Benjamin, promise me?’ his mother had said.

  ‘As you like, darling’—his father, kind, worried.

  ‘After my brother …’

  ‘And Andrew after my father … keep the family line.’

  ‘Benjamin Andrew … that’s all right. Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You are good to me. I’m sorry I’ve been so tiresome …’

  ‘You haven’t, you haven’t, my love.’

  ‘He was rather a struggle for me.’

  ‘I know … I know, but it’s all over.’

  ‘All over. I’m so dreadfully tired, you see …’

  And she had died early in the evening. But his father had kept the promise and so there he was now, tracing the name, Benjamin, Andrew, Rooke-with-an-E.

  Tip-toeing feet, the door swung open and Weathersby’s hatted head, the sunlight from the spotlight glittering on the blank discs of his steel glasses. He looked blind. ‘We’re in, you know.’ He crossed the tiny cabin and started fumbling about on his cluttered bunk hopelessly. ‘I think I left my hanky somewhere here …’ He heaved the bed-roll onto the deck, found the crumpled bit of red-checked cotton, wiped his neck carefully. ‘It’s hot already up there. Can I give you a hand with your stuff? The rest of mine’s all up top.’

  The deck of the LST was crowded with suddenly hurrying people, ropes looped, crates and sacks, men stepping over a wide scurry of rice which had spilled and scattered into the scuppers.

  ‘Whose fucking gear is this then?’ someone yelled and kicked a suitcase under a lifeboat.

  Weathersby gave a little scream and hurried aft, holding his glasses as he ran. ‘It’s mine! It’s mine!’

  From the rail Rooke looked down onto the dockside. Barrels and boxes, wandering Indonesians, scraps of cloth round their heads, flapping shorts, jeeps and trucks, a long line of godowns, roofs gaping, windows scorched with fans of soot, iron girders twisted into rusty, buckled loops. To the left a great column of smoke, black and oily, rising slowly into the still, blue morning sky, a slow-growing cauliflower of immense height, the highest billows lethargically drifting and loitering as they caught the offshore air and veiled out over the distant spires and roofs of the city shimmering in the sun. To the right cranes, railway trucks rusted, a half-demolished building with a metal sign ‘Rotterdam Lloyd’ tilted squint like a fallen brooch.

  Pushing his way through the milling half-naked Indonesians with the aid of a neat little swagger cane with which he lightly cracked every obtrusive body in his path, came a British officer crisp in starched Jungle Greens and a bright crimson lanyard. He stopped at the side of the LST and shouted up, waving a piece of paper which he then used to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun.

  ‘Hi there! Anyone on board? Captain Rooke and, or, a Lieutenant Weathersby? I’m from 95 Indian Div. Come to collect them.’

  ‘I’m Rooke … Weathersby’s somewhere about. I think he’s lost a suitcase.’

  ‘Oh bugger it. You got a lot of gear? I’ve only brought a jeep, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Bed-roll, tin trunk for me … same I suppose for Weathersby. I’ll go and find him.’

  He was still aft by the lifeboat fumbling with his luggage, his cap off. ‘They’ve gone and bust the lock. Rotten sods. No feeling for people’s things.’

  He grabbed his cap and stuck it back on and humped the suitcase down the deck. ‘I’ll have to get a bit of string or something … can’t trust it on one lock.’

  ‘Haven’t time for that now.’ Rooke was mild. ‘There’s a chap from the Division here to collect us … do it when we get ashore.’

  ‘But everything I have is in here! Books, music, my chess set …’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake get a move on, he’s waiting.’

  But he had come aboard, swagger stick tapping the iron rail, hand stroking a small eager moustache. ‘There you are then. Had a bit of trouble?’

  Weathersby shrugged, ‘Someone kicked it about. Broke a lock, I think. I need a bit of string or something … you haven’t seen a bit, have you, anywhere?’ He peered about the crowded, rice-strewn deck, his glasses misting with anger and heat.

  The officer with the stick put out his hand. ‘Pullen,’ he said brightly. ‘We’ll have it fixed when you get to your billet … got to dash now … I’ll get some Japs to bundle this stuff down for you and then we really must be off.’ He yelled down orders to someone on the cobbles below, and with Rooke and Weathersby following made his way down the gangplank and set off for his jeep. A chattering group of Japanese POW’s hurried past them, naked save for baggy white loin cloths, enormous rubber-soled boots and long-peaked khaki caps which gave them the immediate appearance of a flock of panicking ducks.

  With Weathersby clutching his bursting suitcase and miserably squashed in the back of the jeep alongside the bed-rolls and tin trunks they bounced over the railway tracks, and headed away from the ship. Rooke looked sharply back wondering how long it would be before he would be returning. It looked extremely small and frail. He felt a sudden surge of panic at its loss. A severance with something he knew, felt was secure, safe. The future, as h
e sat beside the cheerful but harassed Pullen steering through the seething masses of Asia and the buckled railway lines of the Dutch East Indies Company, seemed filled with the gravest uncertainties.

  ‘Where are we bound for?’ He tried to keep his voice flat and disinterested although he had to raise it above the blaring of the horn and the noise of the crowds about them.

  ‘Well, fact is, I’m taking Lieutenant What’sisname up to “B” Mess till they sort him out … they’re putting you in “A” Mess for the time being because there’s more room, but I can’t take you there, I’m afraid … dropping you off at the Planters’ Club in town. Major Nettles says he’ll give you a lift … he’s GI and he’s up in “A” Mess, you see. It’s all a bit confusing really, but we only got the bumph that you were arriving a day or so ago and there’s been a bit of a flap on here, as you probably know. No one expected you, I’m afraid, the same old Army Fuck Up of course … but what with a nasty flare up on the perimeter last night—that smoke over there is from the rubber dump they hit—AND the Dakota business. I’m afraid it’s all a bit of a rumble bumble.’

  They had left the dock area now and were driving along a dead straight road, full of potholes and rickshaws. Rooke was not sure which were more dangerous. ‘What’s the Dakota business?’ he asked, clutching the side of the jeep and trying to hold himself out of the seat as they crashed into a foot-deep hole.

  Pullen looked at him swiftly. ‘Haven’t heard? Oh … well, one of our Dakotas, we only have three in operation anyway for the moment, made a forced landing on Tuesday just outside the city. Beyond the perimeter. Coming up from Pangpang with twenty refugees, women and children. All Dutch. No one was actually hurt, we gather, landed neatly in paddy fields … but the bloody extremists got there before we could get the convoy out and massacred the lot. Chopped them all to bits; twenty women and children, eight of our blokes and the crew. We finally got through yesterday morning; all buried in a mass grave in a banana plantation near a kampong called Kutt. Appropriately. We forced an old woman to tell us … she had seen the whole thing. Senseless. Bloody senseless. All this in the name of Freedom. I ask you. You’ll see the signs everywhere. A damn great dagger clutched in a fist. All painted in crimson with drops of blood and “Merdeka” written underneath. On every wall, all over the shop. Freedom. God! I thought we’d finished with the war, our lot that is, after Imphal … but this is a bloody sight worse. A civil war. We can’t shoot until they shoot first, we’re sort of bloody Civil Servants in a civil war getting the Dutch out of the prison camps and back to Singapore or Holland … like armed Red Cross. We aren’t soldiers at all.’

  He swerved, and cursed, to avoid two colliding bicyclists and drove faster along the dead straight road. On either side the land was flat, marshy; mangrove and swamp with rubbish tips and crumbled buildings long abandoned. Tall chimney-stacks poked into the brilliant sky but flew no pennants of smoke; speckled brown hawk-like birds swooped and dipped over the stinking heaps of rubbish, power lines trailed and sagged into the boggy land; army lorries rumbled among the rickshaws and cyclists in a constant stream from city to docks; runty-backed dogs with saffron eyes padded through the traffic; and thin laughing girls dressed in tattered white cotton shifts ran to and fro dragging wailing children trailing kites. It was all hazed with the acrid, black fumes from the burning rubber dump across the city. A kind of oriental Munch landscape. Rooke felt a numbing despair and unease.

  The jeep bucketed and bounced over the potholes. Pullen was driving too fast in reflex anger.

  ‘How many planes, I mean apart from the three, I mean two, Dakotas have we got here?’ Rooke had to raise his voice again because they had reached the beginning of a built-up area and the shouts and cries and ringing of rickshaw bells and horns blowing made normal conversation impossible. Pullen started to slow down among the jostling crowds and carts.

  ‘How many what? Planes? Oh none. None at all … just the Dakotas. I mean no bombers, fighters, that kind of thing … no airfield proper either yet, a grass landing strip that’s all. Nearest RAF crowd are up at Seletar on Singapore Island. We’re just an Evacuation centre, got the Dakotas from our generous American cousins; this should have been their bloody area but after the Surrender they handed it all over to us, said it was our area really on account of Malaya being British … they’re busy looking after the Philippines and colonizing bloody Japan with Coca Cola and chewing gum. Why do you ask?’

  Rooke shifted in his bucket seat and thrust his hands under his buttocks to cushion the blows from the potholes. ‘That’s my job. Air Photographic Interpreter … attached to the RAF all through the war.’

  Pullen laughed shortly, slowed down and made signs that he was turning right at a busy crossroads. ‘Lost your job, chum. Nothing like that for you to do here … no planes, no bugger all. Just a few clapped out Dakotas and happy bands of Freedom-loving nig-nogs armed with pangas and grenades. You’d better think up some new qualifications.’

  The right turn at the crossroads had brought them into the European part of the city. Shops along the broad street, trees, two- and three-storey buildings, plaster cracked, red tiles chipped, some windows boarded, signs in Dutch, Urdu, Chinese and Malay. There were few Europeans on the pavements, soldiers for the most part, walking in twos, one blonde woman moving easily, hair blowing, skirt flapping, a large straw basket in her hand full of green fruit; ahead of them, on the right, a shimmer of palm trees, a frangipani; above them a tall white pole from which drooped in the morning air a red and yellow flag with a coiled snake in white. The jeep turned in between two tall pillars. A roughly printed sign on one. ‘Officers’ Club. 95 Ind. Div.’ It was a white concrete 1930-Mussolini-Modern building, marble steps from the tired gravel forecourt, two urns of battered sansevieria, a torn awning.

  As they crunched to a stop, Weathersby thrust a clenched fist between them. His voice was hoarse with fury and dust. ‘A black bishop. You see? Whole suitcase has come apart … chessmen all over the place, and my books … all that bouncing about … no consideration. I’ll have to repack the lot now. Got to collect the things …’

  Pullen swung out of his seat as an Indian corporal came hurrying down the steps and cried out orders for the luggage to be unloaded. Rooke climbed out stiffly, joining Pullen on the marble flight. Weathersby was still grovelling about as the tin trunks were slid off and the bed-rolls manhandled down. Pullen called out to him to wait where he was. ‘Just for a tick. I’ll see that Captain Rooke is taken care of and then we’ll be off. Won’t be a jiffy.’ He ran a finger over his eager little moustache. Weathersby, a hand full of pawns and knights, didn’t look up.

  The hall was long, lofty, cool, floored with wide black and white tiles. Their boots clacked between the little rush mats set here and there along its length. To right and left tall open double doors, with shadowy rooms beyond, fans turning gently in the high ceilings. Ahead a staircase leading up in a curve to the broad gallery which overhung the hallway supported by ugly, functional, concrete brackets. Up the stairs, clinging close to the curving wall, a short centipede of young women in bright floral dresses, mostly Chinese as far as Rooke could tell, chittering and whispering, patting short black hair, poking in a flower here and there or a pink celluloid comb. They watched the two men curiously as they passed them in sudden falls of silence. At the top Pullen stopped.

  ‘I think he must still be interviewing by the look of things. Nettles, I mean. You nip down and wait in the Bar … have a cold beer. I’ll tell him you’re here. I really must get back to the Mess.’ He hurried along to the head of the queue, tapped on a door, waited a moment and then went in, closing it firmly in the face of a Chinese girl who laughed and stuck out her tongue. The others tittered behind quickly-raised hands and then fell silent, watching Rooke as he started down past them to the hall. Near the bottom something slipped and clattered onto the tiled steps. To avoid tripping he grabbed at the iron railing and stepped over a musical instrument. It lay there rocking slightly.


  ‘I’m sorry. It’s mine.’ A cool, clear voice, a long slender arm which retrieved it swiftly. She was taller than the other girls and not Chinese. Long dark hair to her shoulders, wide well-spaced brown eyes, straight brow, pleasant mouth unsmiling. In the crook of her other arm, thrust from a boy’s white shirt, a battered music-case. She held the two possessions close to her as if he might possibly request them. He smiled.

  ‘A banjo?’

  ‘A mandolin.’

  ‘Ah. You speak English?’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘Noël Coward always said that was never quite enough.’

  A flat, long look. Quite blank.

  ‘An English actor.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘Playwright too …’

  ‘I see.’

  He reached out suddenly and touched one of the strings. It twanged softly.

  ‘Can you play this?’

  The arm with the music-case moved swiftly and the hand thrust a strand of dark hair over her shoulder. When she spoke her voice was light, accentless almost, dismissive.

  ‘No. I cook in it.’

  The Chinese girl beside her suddenly squealed, cramming two fists quickly to her mouth to smother the sound. No one spoke. He removed his cap.

  ‘I’m looking for the Bar actually … anyone know where it is?’

  The girl who had squealed removed her fists and pointed down the stairs. ‘In big doors there. Left. Many chairs and tables. You go there.’

  He thanked her gravely. The girl with the mandolin had turned away; he went down slowly.

  A dim room, tables scattered, cane and bamboo chairs in shabby, faded cretonnes. Brass pots with still, spiky palms. A Turkey carpet worn to holes. A long bar with a brass rail and a clutter of bashed leather-topped stools empty at its side. In the ceiling six ugly glass cubist lighting fixtures hung like pink and amber stalactites. Someone had fired a gun at one of them which swung mournfully between the slowly revolving fans, starred with jagged black holes. The place smelled of stale beer and old carpet. An Indian barman in a tired white jacket and a pale blue muslin turban poured him a pint of beer and he carried it to one of the little tables and sat in a cane chair, which sagged. Among the cigarette burns on his table and an ash-tray full of last night’s butts, a crumpled double paged news-sheet; the print smudged and blurred. The Daily Cobra. 95th Indian Division. No. 36. ‘Dakota Passengers Massacred.’ A crossword puzzle, small news items from agencies; in the centre, a grey speckled photograph of Henley Bridge. ‘In England’s Green and Pleasant Land.’