Snakes and Ladders Page 9

  “Room Five Hundred and Four” usually started the same old conversation off again, although I knew it would be hopeless.

  “If you married me now, you’d have a British passport. We could go together.”

  “No. It wouldn’t do, really …”

  “But Pearl, Helga, Nellie … they’re all going. They’ll be on the same ship with their husbands. We could be too.”

  “Don’t, please …”

  “If I asked the General, now, today, he’d be able to fix things, you know he would, he’s very fond of you.”

  “I know … but don’t …”

  “It is because you are half Indonesian, isn’t it?”

  “The British call it half-caste.”

  “But you aren’t! You’re only a third or whatever it is.”

  “Immediately even you start to explain …”

  “I’m not explaining! Only to you, you are so silly.”

  “I’m not silly, I know what it’s like, you don’t. The Dutch didn’t mind. We were encouraged to intermarry, it made the colony stronger. But the British do mind. I remember the British women who came here before the war, from Malaya and from India … polite, sometimes kind, patronising always. And they minded. I know, I was here. I was called a chee-chee.” She laughed gently and repeated it, “a chee-chee.”

  “And it’s because of that only …”

  “Not only. No.”

  “Well, what else?”

  “I don’t think you really know what you ask. You are so romantic. You’ll be bored with me in three months in England and then what would I do?”

  “I love you.”

  But she wasn’t really listening, her eyes closed in the Sunday morning heat, her long slender fingers scrabbling gently in the pebbles of the terrace, her lovely golden skin beaded with little mists of heat-sweat.

  “Pearl says that Harold and she will go to live in Lewisham. Near London. Is it pretty?”

  “Lewisham? Not very, not really.”

  “Will she like it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And Nellie goes to Chesterfield. Is that nice too?”

  “It’s prettier than Lewisham, it’s got a church with a twisted spire.”

  She stroked her arm gently, and slid the bracelet I had given her slowly up and down. Her eyes were still closed, but she smiled. “We have many churches with twisted spires, I don’t think Nellie has ever seen them in her life. When she was fifteen she went straight to Madame Hue’s … do you think they’ll like Nellie in Chesterfield? The spires she remembers best were not on churches.”

  I remember being so angry that I left her and leant over the terrace wall looking down across the uncut lawns to the banana trees and beyond.

  “It’s not fair of you … you and Nellie are not the same …” I was lame with anger.

  “Who can tell the difference in Chesterfield? You thought we were all alike just because we offered to work for you and the Dutch girls wouldn’t because you are the Enemy.”

  “We aren’t the Enemy!”

  “The Dutch think you are. You’re here as policemen …”

  “We’re here to repatriate the Dutch civilians …”

  “They don’t want to be repatriated …”

  “I can’t help that …”

  “You let the Indonesians take over the country.”

  “They want Independence.”

  “And you do nothing to prevent it.”

  “But how can we? It’s not our business … we can’t even fire at them until they fire on us first.”

  She threw a scatter of pebbles at a long green lizard. “So you can’t blame the Dutch; you’re the Enemy. But whether we worked in a Massage Parlour or were rich and had servants of our own before, as I did, we were still the same to you. Easy women.”

  “Shut up! For God’s sake, stop, it always ends like this … I can’t talk to you.”

  “You started it again. Is there some more beer?”

  We sat for a little longer, looking out on to the shining mirrors below, the pale blind volcanoes ridging the sky far ahead, bull frogs croaking, Vera Lynn long since silenced. We were silenced too, until Kim, my Gurka batman with golden teeth, came out to say that lunch was ready, he collected the beer cans and the dish of shrimp heads, and went away.

  “Put her on again, please Pip. I like so much when she says ‘We never thought to ask the price, but who can bargain over Paradise …’ It’s quite good, isn’t it? Awful but quite good.” She laughed and pulled her long dark hair up into a bunch on the top of her head. “I tell you what; at your farewell party next week, after they have all gone, I’ll read the tarot cards again … just for you. Not for me, for you. Will you let me?”

  I had always refused this strange gift of hers. Everyone else I knew had let her do it, but I was too afraid always for I instinctively believed in it, as she did, and I have never wanted to know what the future had in store for me, finding the present either pleasant enough, or difficult enough without having to be alerted to the tribulations or terrors ahead. However, miserable, irritated and angry as I was that morning, I said “yes”, and we went into lunch and I forgot about it all, immersed in self-pity, rage at not getting my own way, and six cans of thin American beer.

  * * *

  “I’m afraid it’s one of my messes, darling,” said my mother with no apology since no apology was needed for, as I have said, she could conjure up a meal from three biscuits, a kidney, a piece of bacon rind and whatever vegetable she had been able to find in her garden, or from some generous neighbour’s, or the village grocers.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, “I hope there are seconds, I mean second helpings …”

  She was gratified. “You just dice the bacon rind, the kidney, sauté them and mix them all up with a lot of carrots. Thank God for carrots. We’d have starved to death without them.”

  * * *

  Vera Lynn. In my tent in the apple orchard at St Suplice, the night alive with sound; two idiots in Messerschmitts strafing us up and down, tracer bullets ripping through the leafy branches, the horizon beyond Caen white with fire, the earth shaking like a jelly with the thudding of the big guns; the Fall of Paris in that splendid, hysterical, final August week. The enormous tricolour floating gently from the Arc de Triomphe, tanks nudging about outside the Hotel Crillon like sullen carp, bullets chipping the stonework of the Cathedral, and roses, roses all the way. German faces, pale, gaunt, taut, watching as we crossed the Rhine, a toy-town countryside with all the farms ablaze; slave labourers freed into the streets near Rheine, a band of shaven-headed women heaving a grand piano out of a second floor window so that it fell, with a wild jangle of wires, into a heavy white magnolia, the whole hanging for a moment in suspended motion, until everything crashed down amidst a torrent of leaves, blossom and splintered keys, the ashen-faced owners, with two small children, standing stupefied, silent beside me as slowly, their house began to burn; air raid shelters and the smell of dust, cordite and ashes. The slow swell of the Red Sea, flying fishes racing across the bows of the ship; lying naked on the decks in the sweating nights, a lifebelt for a pillow, still, save for a portable gramophone softly playing somewhere among the thousand black forms, “The White Cliffs of Dover”, from which we were slowly steaming East and to which many of us would not be returning. And through it all, always, her voice.

  * * *

  “Your Ration Book has been a vast help already, I got two eggs from Bannisters yesterday … a Welcome Home present, I imagine, but the extra butter will be such a help, and the sugar. Sylvia gave me a quarter pound she didn’t need, she’s awfully generous, you know.”

  “When I come back from town, next week some time, do you think we might ask Mrs Lewis in for tea or something.”

  “Of course. She often drops in. There isn’t much to do down here, as you gather; whenever you like.”

  “I’d just like to thank her really, that’s all. Or do you think she’d think I was daft or somethin
g?”

  My mother neatly placed her knife and fork together on her plate. “Not that kind of woman, darling.”

  * * *

  Later, at the gate, she said, “You realise that this is the first time in years that you have gone to a train and it hasn’t been a farewell?”

  “We never did that, did we?”

  “After you had gone I did. When I was alone. I cried; but alone. It’s such a messy business, and you had enough to worry you anyway.”

  “You were very good and very brave …”

  “I was, but you don’t really know, you’ve never had a son.”

  Silly, bloody, Harri. My farewell party that evening had been quite good. Nellie and her future husband Roger, Pearl and Harold, Helga and Peter, two Yanks from Shell Petrol starting up the business again, some of the Dutch staff from Radio Batavia where, for a while, I was the British announcer, playing requests and sending messages between the many prison camps all over the island.

  Harri was looking tall and cool in a steel-coloured satin dress which she had had made up to a design I had done for her, by a Chinese friend in the quarter in which she lived. Her hair long and shining, the wide pewter bracelets, like cuffs, on each arm, new sandals we had bought for her from an Indian in the city.

  The party started off at sundown; drinks on the terrace, Japanese White Horse whisky, looted French wine, Bols Geneva, bowls of curried chicken, prawns, rice, mangoes and a big slab of oily cheese which the Yanks had brought from their Mess. We finished, and when they had all gone, leaving only Harold from “A” Mess and Pearl, who were to give Harri a lift home in their jeep, and me as high as a kite on Japanese White Horse, we did the tarot as I had agreed.

  She was always very serious about the cards, and never drank anyway, which irritated me when I had had too much. She laid them all out as solemnly as a Mass, which, as far as she was concerned, we were attending. Pearl was a believer naturally, Harold was as high as I was and didn’t really care much one way or the other. There seemed to be nothing very dreadful in store for me, or if there was she was not about to let on; she murmured something about “Lights … all lights, everything is light,” and, after a long thinking pause, poking among her medieval pack, she suddenly shuffled them all together with a brisk laugh and thanked me for being so brave. Harold, I suppose out of relief, nearly broke my neck with an affectionate punch, and told Pearl to get her bits and pieces together. It was half an hour to curfew.

  At the front door, waiting for the jeep, she suddenly thrust her hand over mine and crushed it hard. “You see; it wasn’t so awful, was it … the cards …?”

  “No. Not awful. Unless you saw something that you won’t tell me …”

  She laughed and shook her wild hair. “Nothing, Pip … nothing bad, only light I saw, and that’s good I think, don’t you?” She leant up and kissed me suddenly on the neck just as the headlights of the jeep swung into the forecourt.

  She and Pearl climbed into the back, struggling and laughing with their long, tight skirts, Harri clutching her box of tarot cards and the little steel mesh bag we had found together in the market. Harold revved up, and she pulled my head towards her with her one free arm. “Thank you, Pip. Next time I see you you will be in uniform.”

  “I know! Tomorrow.”

  “No, no, not this uniform. A different colour, different badges, a bird I think, and there will be light everywhere. You see.”

  Harold said, soberly, “The big war’s over now, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Not for Pip,” she said. “The next time, you will see!”

  The jeep lurched, swept round the lily-pond and raced off down the drive scattering gravel into the canna lilies. I stood until I heard them reach the main road, turn right, double de-clutch, and roar off towards the city. All was still. Somewhere in the house Kim was busy stacking glasses and plates; the sky shimmered with a billion winking, silent stars, up the hill in the General’s house there were three lighted windows. I went to get my cap and papers, for the Nightly Report. The frogs began to agree among themselves.

  I never saw her again. She didn’t come to the office in the morning, or any morning following, and although I went again and again to the little Chinese kampong where she lived, no one knew where she had gone. The veranda was empty. Just the two bamboo rocking chairs, the rain-warped table, vivid sunflowers thrusting through the palings, doors and shutters locked. The Chinese smiled all the time, hands clasped, heads bobbing, shaking sadly with gold and silver smiles; no one knew where she was, or where she had gone. I left notes, but perhaps they blew away.

  * * *

  Trailing up to Victoria through the misty decay of an English October, my past seemed vividly clear; it was after all, only a few weeks old. My present seemed, and was, indefinite, obscure, a clutter of emotions. My future was imponderable, a long dark corridor with all the doors apparently closed, and without even the very smallest candle to light the way. Had I been thinking these thoughts aloud it would have been extremely unpleasing, since all that would have emerged would have been a high pitched wail of whining self-pity. And I was not a whit different from thousands of others who were all in the same boat; the thought, when it came, gave me no comfort. They were just The Others, and I’d never had much time for them anyway. Muffled as I was in my tattered rags of self-esteem and selfishness, my total fear of the corridor ahead, my nagging worry of my own inadequacy, I simply hadn’t got the guts, slumped in my 1st Class corner of the 2.45 from Hassocks to Victoria, to hazard a guess as to what lay before me.

  * * *

  With my rapidly dwindling Gratuity I took a small bedroom on the Strand side of the Savoy and, thumbing eagerly through my tattered address book, began to try and make contact with the friends from before the war. It was a dreary chore. Voices, when they answered, were pleasant, surprised, glad to know I was safe and well and otherwise occupied, or on Tour, or starting a Tour, or trying, themselves, to settle down to the exhaustion of Peace. But no one actually threw their metaphorical hats in the air and invited me to endless parties. The fact was that I really had no friends from before the war; and most of them had been older than myself anyway. The Blitz had forced people to move about a good deal, and the telephone numbers either didn’t reply or, if they did, were no longer the ones where my acquaintances lived.

  London was as suddenly empty as Sussex—and behind the pleased voices of the few I contacted there lurked a thread of fear that I might just perhaps ask for help in getting a job. Everyone was trying to get a job; the theatre was jammed, it was always explained, with returned actors trying to get a job. The message, though infinitely tactful, was infinitely clear.

  In desperation one day, for I had to find some sort of work before Windlesham’s term began in January, and the theatre was, much as I disliked the idea, the only thing I knew from the past to do, I went down to Kew Bridge once again to see Beattie de Leon in her little theatre hoping that perhaps she could find me a temporary fill-in job until I went off to be a Prep School teacher. Apart from asking me, with mild surprise, if I had been away for the last six years, she said that after so long out of things I must be a bit rusty and that I should try somewhere else first, because the standard, as I must remember, was very high at “Q”. But where else to try, I wondered?

  I ate a miserable lunch in a pub near Leicester Square, bread and cheese and a half of bitter, and saw a poster announcing “Crime and Punishment” at the New Theatre starring my friend from long before, Peter Ustinov. Since we had joined the Army together, and since he was the first actor, all those years ago at the Barn Theatre, Shere, in Surrey, to explain to me about Dedication and the Theatre and had so fired my imagination that I had gone into the profession with all the passion, faith and determination of a nun taking Holy Orders, surely he must be the one to whom I could now turn for advice. And he was presently only round the corner.

  It was a rehearsal, and he had not as yet arrived at the theatre. Thinking to surprise him in my tattered
, but well-pressed, uniform, I stood among the huddle of pallid fans gathered round the Stage Door. Presently a low, smart, blue sports car drove up, and parked imperiously. There was Peter himself, a little plumper, beaming genially, clutching papers and books, his hair as wild as I had remembered it from ‘39 … but successful clearly. People moved in with books and he happily signed, saw me, smiled above the scarfed heads of his fans and said cheerfully: “Hello! If you have come to try and get a job, forget it! I can’t get one for myself.” He smiled at us all, made a little joke, and strode into his theatre.

  It is fortunate for me that hopelessness has usually made me extravagant and seldom suicidal. By that I mean that rather than jump off a bridge, resort to pills or an oven, I nearly always go and spend whatever I have left in my pocket on something idiotic, joyful, useless, and pleasurable, and so it was that after three or four fruitless and down-casting days in the questionable splendour of my one-bedded room on the Strand side of the Savoy, I decided to spend the last of my slender means in a final burst of epicurian delight in the Grill; and return to Sussex the next morning broke, humbled, and not too proud to borrow from my parents and just live at home.

  Someone waved across the room to my single table, and blew kisses. It was Lusia Perry. I have known Lusia for so long that I don’t even remember now how or where we first met. Russian, or as near Russian as makes no difference, she was dark, cheerful, loving, vivid and as comforting as the samovar which she always had steaming away in her tumbled mews flat in South Kensington where she lived with her small daughters, Natasha and Nina. There was a Mr Perry but I don’t remember that I ever met him. There was tea, or baked potatoes with heaps of rock salt, or bowls of Bortsch, and always love, encouragement, and laughter and, above all, conversation. With her aliveness, her interest, her tremendous vitality and Russianism, if that is a word, she attracted people in all walks of life to her untidy, noisy, delightful mews off the Brompton Road.

  And there she sat, across the Grill, waving and laughing, the eternal cigarette between her lips, beckoning me across.