The Chequer Board

  He was with Nay Htohn alone for a few minutes after breakfast, on the verandah, as they waited for the steamer to come in sight around the bend of the river.

  “When you see Phillip’s mother,” she said quietly, “try and make her like me. I know she does not like me now. That is curious, because we have never met. I know that it is difficult for old people in England to understand a mixed marriage like ours. It’s difficult here, too. Some of my aunts think that I have done a dreadful thing in marrying an Englishman. But we have been very happy so far, and I do not fear the future. Try and make his mother understand.”

  Mr Turner said, “I’ll try. I’ll go and tell her just how you live, and what you have for dinner, and how you run the house, and that. But you mustn’t expect too much. She’s old, and she’s an invalid, too. I don’t think she ever goes out.”

  Nay Htohn smiled. “That is the trouble with the English,” she said. “They so seldom go out, to see for themselves.”

  He sat talking to Morgan and his wife until the steamer came in sight up the river; then they got into the jeep and drove down to the jetty. The steamer came in and berthed for her few minutes’ stay. Morgan carried Mr Turner’s suitcase on board and found his cabin. They went out on deck, and found the captain waiting for Morgan to go ashore before casting off.

  Morgan held out his hand. “Well, this is good-bye,” he said. “Thanks a lot for coming, Turner. If ever you get a chance, come out for a longer stay and I’ll take you up country for a tour.” He said that because it is the sort of thing you do say, even when you know, or perhaps because you do know, that it can never happen.

  Mr Turner shook his hand. “You’ve seen the last o’ me,” he said simply. “I’d like to have seen the Shan Hills, ’n all that, but I won’t now. Still, I’ve seen things I never thought to see when I was working in the flour business. I’ll go ’n see your mother soon as I get back.”

  Nay Htohn said, “Good-bye, Mr Turner. We are very proud to have had you staying in our house.”

  He smiled, thinking that at last her perfect English had betrayed her. “Wish I could have stayed a bit longer,” he said. “But I got to be getting on.” He grinned. “I haven’t got much time.”

  Morgan and Nay Htohn went on to the jetty; the moorings were cast off, and the steamer pulled out into the stream. They stood close together, waving. Mr Turner stood on the upper deck, waving to them in turn until they dwindled in the distance, and were gone.

  The captain, a Burman, paused by him, and said, “You have been staying with Mr Morgan?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner, “just for a day or two. I haven’t seen him since the war.”

  The captain said, “He is a very fine man, and he married into a very good family. One day he will be a member of the Government.”

  Mr Turner settled down in a deck chair, smoking his cheroot and figuring the cost of it as the river scene passed by him. Cheroots in Mandinaung cost two rupees twelve annas for a hundred, or about three a penny, a price which Nay Htohn considered to be gross extortion and nearly double what they should be. They were good big cigars, mild and satisfying, with a filter tip of pith; Mr Turner considered that in a London shop they were worth a shilling of anybody’s money. He had no intention of returning to London out of pocket by this journey. He travelled thoughtfully down river, and when he reached Rangoon he telephoned to his Chinese agent, Mr S. O. Chang, from his hotel bedroom, sitting on the bed as he would have done in Birmingham or Hull. He said:

  “Afternoon, Mr Chang—I just got back from Mandinaung. Yes, I had a very good time. I’m leaving for England day after tomorrow, but before I go I thought it would be kind of nice to ship a few of these Burma cheroots back home, and see what I could do with them. You know, the Danubyu ones with the filter tip. Suppose a chap wanted to buy a little parcel of them, say about twenty thousand, how would he set about it?”

  Mr Chang told him, thrusting his own finger deep into the pie. Mr Turner pulled it out a bit next day, and left for England at the end of the week, having seen the packing cases sealed and delivered to the shipping company. He travelled home by air, as he had come, in a great flying boat from the Rangoon River. For four days he dozed across the world, rested and relaxed in the cool air as the burning deserts of Sind and Arabia passed slowly far below and gave place to the Libyan sands, the blue wastes of the Mediterranean, and the small fields of France. He ate a good deal and slept a good deal, and he got back to England at the beginning of August, just a month from the day he left.

  He had not told his wife which day he was arriving because he did not know himself. From the airway terminus he took a taxi to the underground, and travelled out to Watford, carrying his bag, as he had done so many times returning from a business trip into the provinces. It was a warm afternoon, so he took a taxi at the station, and he opened his front door with his latchkey and walked in.

  The house was empty, but there were food and fresh milk in the larder, and the kettle on the gas stove was still faintly warm. He diagnosed that his wife had been there at lunchtime and had made herself a cup of tea. “At the pictures,” he said thoughtfully, “or else over with Laura.” He did not resent her absence, for he had not told her when he was arriving. He prowled around the house for a short time, savouring his old familiar things, and presently he found The Daily Express, and carried a deck chair out into the garden, and sat down to read the paper. But in a very short time it was draped across his face, and he was lying back at ease.

  Funny to think that Mollie was at the pictures, and Nay Htohn, she liked the pictures, just the same. The same pictures, too. Funny to think that Nay Htohn was living seven thousand miles away, right the other side of the world. Funny the way he’d sort of felt at home in her house, in spite of everything being different.

  He slept.

  His wife, returning from the pictures, came to the French window of the sitting room and saw him sitting there asleep on the lawn of their long, narrow strip of garden; her heart leaped at the sight of him, for she had missed him very much. The knowledge that she would not have him for much longer had given him an added value to her. She had wanted to meet him on his way home from so long a journey, and to make him welcome. He had eluded her, and here he was, as always, asleep with a newspaper across his face, as though he had been no farther than the office or the warehouse at Gravesend. A momentary wave of disappointment swept over her, and a little irritation; she had wanted so much to do something special for him, and the opportunity was gone.

  She walked down the garden and stood by his chair. “Well, you’re a fine one,” she said amiably, “slinking in like that without a word, and going off to sleep with a newspaper, after being half across the world and all. Ain’t you got no romance in you?”

  He opened his eyes, and brushed away the paper. “Hullo,” he said vaguely. “I must have dropped off.”

  “I’ll say you did.” She smiled down at him. “You might have let me know when you were coming. I’d have come to meet you, or something.”

  He said, “I didn’t know, myself.”

  “Did you have a good trip? You’re home much quicker than I thought you’d be, going all that way. It’s only just a month since you left.”

  “Aye,” he said, “just about a month. There wasn’t much to do when I got there, so I come home again.”

  She said, “Pretty hopeless, was it?”

  He looked up. “Hopeless? What d’you mean?”

  “This chap that you went out to see, the pilot fellow. Couldn’t you do nothing for him?”

  “For him?” Mr Turner smiled thoughtfully. “I got a bit of a surprise,” he said. “It’s not like we thought at all. He’s got a better job than I have, and lives ever so much better, too. Great big house he lives in, with about five servants. He’s all right.”

  She said, puzzled, “But I thought he lived with a native woman.” And then, curiously, “Did you see her?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner. “As nice a girl as any
that you’d find in Watford, or in Harrow, either. It’s quite different to what we thought.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Could she speak any English?”

  “Better ’n you or me,” said Mr Turner. “I tell you, Mr Morgan done very well for himself when he got rid of the other one and married her. Two lovely little kids, they’ve got.”

  She said impulsively, “But whatever colour are the children?”

  “Yellowy,” he replied. “Sort of half-and-half, you might say.”

  “How awful!”

  “I dunno,” said Mr Turner. “Things look sort of different out there to what they do back here. Let’s have a cup o’ tea, and I’ll tell you.”

  She studied him with some concern over tea. In the month that he had been away he had changed, and not for the better. He seemed well and cheerful, but a little shrunken, and with a good deal less energy. The disability of his right hand was markedly increased, and he had difficulty in using it for cutting his food with a knife; he made increasing use of his left hand. She realised heavily that this was one of the things that must be; from now on he would need her more and more.

  She said, “How have you been, in yourself, Jackie? Had any pain, or any of them dizzy fits?”

  He said, “I had a fall, ’n passed out for three hours.”

  “Three hours!” She was appalled. “Was anyone with you?”

  He told her how it had happened, and what had been done. “They couldn’t have been nicer,” he said. “No one could have done more. There wasn’t any doctor in the place, but I didn’t need one. I got over it all right.”

  She said, “You’d better see Doctor Worth, now you’re back.”

  “I don’t want to go seeing no more doctors,” Mr Turner replied. “I know what’s coming, ’n there’s no good bellyaching about it, wasting people’s time.”

  They took another chair out into the garden, and sat together while he told her about his journey, what he had seen and heard. It took an hour. She listened carefully, trying to understand the changes that had taken place in his outlook.

  At last she said, “Well, what are you going to do now, Jackie? Going to try it in the office?”

  She had worked, herself, for several years in an office. She knew that managements are generally kind to the individual; especially where the individual is known. In asking if he was going to try it in the office, she knew that in his case there would be no harsh dividing line between employment and sick leave; so long as he showed his face now and then and did a bit of work when he could manage it, he would draw his salary all right. Sick leave for Mr Turner would begin when he had not shown up for a consecutive fortnight or so, not till then.

  He said, “I think so.” He thought for a minute, and then said, “I got to think about them other two, the corporal and the nigger. I’m not so much worried about the nigger, now; it looks like he got off all right. I would like to know about that Corporal Brent, though.”

  She said, “I wouldn’t bother about the nigger any more, Jackie. He’ll be back in Nashville, or some place like that. He’ll be all right.”

  “Aye,” he said slowly, “I think he’s all right. I don’t think I’ll do much about him. It’s just Duggie Brent now.”

  His wife said, “I expect he’s all right, too.”

  “Maybe,” said Mr Turner thoughtfully. “But I’d like to know.”

  In the distance they heard the church clock strike six. Mollie asked what he wanted to do that evening, and Mr Turner said at once that perhaps it would be nice to take a run out to the Barley Mow. She vetoed that, on the score that he was tired after his journey, and won her case. Instead, they talked about Burma, and about her refresher course in shorthand typing, and presently they moved indoors, as it grew cool, and put the wireless on and listened to “Itma” with Tommy Handley and Lady Sonly and Inspector Ankles and the Colonel and Naive, and Mr Turner, who had missed this programme very much while he had been away, laughed until the tears came to his eyes, and fifteen million other people in the British Islands did the same.

  He went down to the office next day—only a day or two adrift on his holiday time—and found a little work to do, and told the Managing Director about Mr S. O. Chang in far Rangoon. Secretly they were all rather shocked to see the change in him. If Mr Parkinson had wanted any confirmation of the sentence of death passed on Turner, he found it in the change in his appearance.

  He went back to the office after lunch for a short time, and then went out and took a bus to Notting Hill Gate. He walked slowly through the streets to Ladbroke Square, and then up the steps, and rang the bell. Again the door was opened to him by Morgan’s sister, as it had been only about five weeks before.

  “Good afternoon,” he said.

  The girl said, “Oh—it’s you.”

  “Aye,” he said, “it’s me all right. I’ve been staying with your brother, out in Mandinaung, Miss Morgan. I told him that I’d come and see you when I got back home. I got some things to tell his mother.”

  She stared at him. “You say you’ve been staying with my brother, out in Burma?”

  “That’s right.”

  She did not move from the door, or ask him in. “You can’t have been,” she said suspiciously. “You were here only the other day.”

  He said, “I flew out, and flew back again; I was in Burma just on a fortnight. I was staying with your brother Thursday of last week.”

  “But that’s fantastic …” She moved aside, still only half convinced that this was not some imposition. “Come in, Mr Turner.”

  She took him up to the first-floor drawing room. The mother was not there, and one of the long windows was open, letting fresh air and sunlight into the room.

  “Yes,” he said, “I made a very quick trip, but I got time to spend a few days with your brother, up at Mandinaung.”

  “At Mandinaung? You went and saw him there?”

  “That’s right. He gave me a fine time.”

  She stared at him. “But could he … where did you stay?”

  Mr Turner said, “I don’t know as you’ve got the right idea of how he lives, Miss Morgan. He’s got a great big house, ’n servants, ’n a good job, too. It’s true enough he lived in a palm hut for a while after the war, same as any young couple might live in a prefab when they start off first. But now he’s built himself a great big house outside the town. Real lovely that house is,” he said a little wistfully. “He’s living better than what I do, or what you do here.”

  She said, “He did mention something about a new house, once …” She glanced at Mr Turner. “I’m afraid we don’t know as much about my brother as we ought to,” she said. “There was—well, something of a breach when he married that native woman. We don’t hear from him very often.” She paused, and then asked, “Did you see her?”

  “Aye,” said Mr Turner, “I saw quite a lot of her. As nice a girl as any that you’d find in this country or any other.”

  She stared at him, incredulous, and then asked, as Mollie had, “Can she speak any English?”

  He felt at a loss, not knowing where to begin. “She speaks better’n what I do, by a long chalk,” he said. “She’s a very well-educated girl, Miss Morgan, and come of a good family, too. I think your brother done all right for himself, marrying her, if you ask me.”

  She said, “But they lived in a palm hut in the jungle!”

  The wheel had gone the full circle, and Mr Turner started again, patiently. He told her about the house, the meals, the furniture, the children, the servants; he told her everything that he could think of about life in Mandinaung. As he talked, there came to his mind the figure of Nay Htohn, wistful. “That is the trouble with the English,” she had said. “They so seldom go out to see for themselves.” He talked to Morgan’s sister with the figure of the Burman girl before his eyes, and he talked for nearly half an hour, and he was very tired by the time he had done.

  A uniformed nurse came into the room, hesitated at the door on seeing
Turner, and went out again. Miss Morgan said, “My mother is ill, Mr Turner, or I should have liked her to see you and to hear all this. But I’m afraid she is too ill to see you now.”

  “That don’t matter,” he said. “I’ll look in some other time, when she’s up and about again.”

  The girl hesitated. “That’s very kind of you,” she said at last. “My mother had a stroke soon after you were here before. She’s very ill. If she recovers sufficiently, I will let you know. But she’s made no progress in the last three weeks and the doctor tells me I must be prepared for anything,”

  “Dying, eh?” said Mr Turner.

  She nodded, and her eyes were very full.

  “Well, there’s a pair of us,” he said cheerfully. “I’m dying, too.” The girl stared at him indignantly. “It’s a fact,” he said. “This wound in my old napper’s going wrong on me.” She glanced involuntarily at the great wound on his forehead, red and angry. “I got till next April, not longer, and I don’t reckon that I’ll be in circulation after Christmas. I’ve had it, Miss Morgan. But what the hell? All be the same in a hundred years, that’s what I say.”

  She said, rather at a loss, “I am so sorry.”

  “So am I,” said Mr Turner. “I’d like to have gone on a bit longer, but that’s the way it is.” He thought for a minute. “I think you should go out and stay with your brother,” he said at last. “After your mother’s gone, that is. I think you ought to go and see with your own eyes how different it all is to what you think. It don’t cost much to go, considering what you’d get out of it.”

  She said seriously, “I’ll think that over, Mr Turner. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  He said, “You won’t be seeing me again, Miss Morgan, I don’t suppose, because of what I told you.” He got to his feet to go. “So just remember this. When your Ma dies, you write out to your brother, ’n go out and spend a few months with him, ’n get to know your sister-in-law. You girls are of an age and educated much the same; you’ll hit it off with her all right if you can just forget what folks have told you about colour and judge for yourself from what you see with your own eyes. I don’t ask more than that. Just make up your own mind from what you see with your own eyes.” He picked up his hat. “Well, I must be getting along.”