Key to the Door

  Knotman was not the wild impulsive drinker he had seemed at first, his boozing having enough method to be a helpful and enjoyable habit. The impression bossed Brian that Knotman had developed, through the jungle of years and circumstance, a sort of calm and order into his existence, a compromise between strange perplexity and wakeful eyes, whereas Brian at the moment saw life as something you bashed into without thought or consideration either for others or for yourself, because he had neither the time nor the intelligence to manage things better. Everybody’s different from each other, he thought, and I know for a fact I ain’t got the wisdom of Knotman. I wonder whether I’ll be cleverer, though, by the time I’m his age?

  Between bouts of swimming, after a fight with the swell of the tide—near to panic on the last hundred yards to his depth—Brian sat on the beach and, joined by Baker, built castles in the sand. Each structure was enclosed by a complex zigzag of exterior moats, and endless tunnels led from one system to another beneath the medieval story-book designs. They sat with the patience and built-in delight of children, creating edifices out of sand, using skill to keep lines angular and embankments firm. Before climbing back for tiffin at midday they would watch the tide come in, its advance-guard of foam creeping nearer by the inch to the outer wall of fortifications. The first wall crumbled like bread, Brian feeling a quiet I-told-you-so satisfaction at the unalterable laws of the slow war of attrition between earth and water. Artifice made the contest more exciting: tunnels built out to the water led under the highest towers, so that they collapsed while the tide was still some feet away, a subtle fuse of destruction that gave great delight when it worked cleanly.

  Mimi came to see him once during his leave. He hadn’t expected her at all, had given her up with bitter disappointment because his holiday was nearly at an end, so that she appeared almost as a disturbance in the calm atmosphere of Muka. But when he saw her standing by the gate in a blue flowered dress, a yellow parasol on her shoulder, holding a straw picnic bag in one hand and waving to him with the other, it was as if excitement punched him under the heart: suddenly filling the gaps of what was an obviously thin existence when she wasn’t nearby.

  They shook hands, laughing because such stilted formality made it seem as if they hadn’t seen each other for years. “You didn’t expect me, did you?”

  “Too true, I didn’t. I nearly gave up hope—which means I’m glad to see you.” She explained how late she’d been sleeping after long and heavy nights at the Boston, her serious face more placid than when she sat unspeaking. They stopped at a stall in the village to buy bottles of beer, plantains, and oranges. An old Malay passed, driving a bullock cart loaded with coconut husks; he wore sari and sandals, and brown ribs at his chest stuck out like a lesson in anatomical engineering. Brian reached for her hand. The curve of the open and deserted coast, like an ivory boomerang held in the cool blue teeth of the sea, took on a flesh-and-blood feeling of reality now that she was with him. “Don’t you think it’s the best scenery you’ve ever seen?” She walked sedately a few paces off, swivelling the opened parasol on her shoulder so that the shadow of its hood rippled on the road as if taunting their walking feet to come under it out of the sun. “Yes,” she said, “it is good”—with a sincerity that for once satisfied him.

  They turned on to the beach at Telok Bahang. The high forested hill of Muka rose leftwards, topped by the white pinnacle of a lighthouse. He led her to the cut-off beach seen from the lorry, over an arm of rocks, to a hummock of untouched sand. Mimi looked through his pack as soon as they sat down. “You naughty boy,” she laughed, “you didn’t bring a swimming suit.”

  “Who needs one here?” He pulled off shorts and shirt, felt the sun rush against his flesh like warm water. “You’ll soon be as brown as a Tamil,” she said, looking at him. “You were fair and white when I first saw you.”

  “Well, which do you like best?” unbuttoning the back of her dress.

  “Black,” she said. “I want you to be like a Negro. Leave me alone,” she giggled. “I can manage.” The top part of her dress spread around, one petal fallen from the flower of her. “I can’t get as black as a Negro,” he said. “I would if I could, though, to make you happy.”

  “I am happy,” she said lazily.

  “Happier, then. Maybe I’ll rub boot-polish all over me, if that’ll satisfy you.”

  “I wouldn’t like the smell.” She drew Chinese lettering in the sand.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “It’s a poem: ‘Poppies live best in a blue wind.’”

  “Funny poem.”

  “I read it in a book.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means what it says.”

  “What’s a blue wind, though?”

  “What poppies live best in,” she said.

  “I don’t get it. I’ll bet you aren’t writing that at all.”

  She rubbed it out. “Yes, I was. Why, don’t you like it?”

  “I do.” He felt foolish and clumsy. “I don’t know what it means, but it sounds good.” They lay close to each other, and he thought it strange, his brown arms around her pale, almost tawny flesh. Her nakedness had no relation to the sun, whereas his had longed for it, taken the full rush of its energy and heat during his year in Malaya, and held it like a power for good. His body was lithe—sinewy arms and broad chest tapering to thin loins, and Mimi’s body was strangely cool to the touch, sun-rejecting, alert to his caresses and graceful in slow movements of reaction that tore passion out of him. The sea knitted its quiet feet into the sand, withdrew, came back with a slow hiss one tone below the wind, an echo and at the same time a forerunner of its chafing at the tree-tops behind. He felt locked in a timeless dream of sun, water, and sand, held by forest and sky and boulders and the cream-like water they suddenly ran into, away from the enervating sting of the sun and the subtle ache of satisfied loins. He caught her from behind, flattening her breasts in the spread of his fingers. Coconut oil on her hair mixed with salt water, and rubbing his face into it, he savoured the whole familiarity of her who lay beneath. In the long moment he dragged her laughing away into the gritty foam, and beyond into clear water, swimming back later to eat sandwiches and drink beer. He lit a cigarette, noticing that when he struck a match its flame was invisible because the outside heat was so intense. They slept naked, and when she nipped his thigh to wake him up he leapt after her along the sand, over boulders and into the shade of trees. A livid green snake ran off from them, its body effortlessly curving through leaves and twigs, no visible source of energy carrying it along. Trees like endless columns rose above, shutting out sky from the flowerless jungle. When they ran to the warm sand, a predatory urge came into his lions. She drew him into the shade of a rock, roused again by the blind inconsiderate animal force of his lust, her caresses sluggish until the overpowering crisis came into them, the orgasm beginning in her like the quick pleasure of warmth after the whole body had been unknowingly cold without.

  “I’ll never leave Malaya,” he said after.

  “You mean you love me?”

  “You know I do. It’s marvellous here.”

  The next evening he went back to Worthington, had no sooner unloaded his pack than Corporal Williams came to say he was to start operating on the DF frequency in the signals hut. “Give me time to get back to the bleeding camp,” Brian said, seeing he’d be unable to visit Mimi that night.

  “Don’t blame me,” Williams said, one of those long-standing wireless-op corporals on whom prolonged morse-taking had acted like shellshock: left him with an apologetic face, a permanent stare, and hands that shook as if he’d got palsy. “A Dakota’s coming up from Singapore. Flying control say you’re to listen out for him.”

  He picked up his drinking mug and tin of cigarettes, stuffed them in his small pack, and walked towards signals, dejected and enraged, spoiled by his fortnight of freedom. Hands in pockets, he followed the path through the trees, oblivious to a jumped-up sharp command
from the adjutant standing outside the orderly room. “Airman!” he called again when Brian still headed for the medley of different morse-pitches coming from signals. He put his cap on, went over, and saluted.

  “Why weren’t you wearing your cap, Airman?”

  The sidewalk of the long, single-storied hut of the admin block was raised a foot above the soil on which Brian stood. The adjutant had a sardonic look on his face, fixed as if it had been branded there from birth—the only expression in fact that gave it a glimmer of intelligence. He had what Brian assumed (from his reading of mediocre novels) to be finely chiselled features, though there was no denying that drink and a giving-up of life had left them as blotched and pock-marked as the king’s-head side of an old coin. He wasn’t known for a martinet, was easygoing, almost dead-cush in fact, the more gentlemanly sort of officer who only bothered to pick up a “crime” when he was bored by the dead days of his regular life; the worst sort in a way because you never knew how to take him, were caught unawares like now when you relaxed your alertness and protective screen of cunning.

  He had no answer, yet said: “With signals section being so near, I didn’t think it was necessary, sir”—his voice a calculated blend of defiance and regret that he had sinned. In a similar situation Kirkby had a knack of looking as if he’d just finished fourteen days’ jankers, so was half-pitied and merely told off for what “wrong” he had done, but Brian’s face and feelings were too friendly with each other to be much help. I’m not fresh into the air-force school like some, he cursed. I’ve done four years’ work in a factory already. I’m married and got a kid—though you wouldn’t think so, the way I let them boss me around.

  “What’s your name?”

  I’ll get seven days, I suppose. He could hear Baker laughing from the billet window. “Seaton, sir.”

  “Why are you going to the signals section?”

  He’ll ask me why I was born next. “I’m on watch, sir.” It’s best to stick it out. As Knotman says: “If you want to fight them, do it on your own terms. Otherwise you’ll lose.”

  “Well, look, Seaton, don’t let me catch you outside the billet again without your hat being where it’s supposed to be.”

  He walked away, laughing to himself that he hadn’t been confined to camp for seven to fourteen days. If I was the government I’d nationalize the air force and close it down.

  He tuned in his receiver, turned the slow-motion dial until, key pressed, the strident whistle of the transmitter crept up on his eardrums. It rose to a shriek, the strong piercing cry of a soul in torment above the Ironside layer, burning the relays of its earthbound transmitter until he lifted his hand off the key and stopped it. He then tapped out a call to Singapore to test his signals strength. QSA 4—QRK 3. Not bad for half-past six.

  A message came from the lumbering Dakota high above the backbone of jungle. In work his bitterness was forgotten, and after the plane landed he amused himself by sending poetry from the Pelican book by his set, each letter going out at fast speed, hot sparks burning the brain of anyone who could read its symbols. Word by word, line by rhythmical line, the whole of Kubla Khan found its way from his key, and he felt exhilarated in knowing that such a poem was filling the jungles and oceans of the Far East, coming, if anyone heard it, from an unknown and unanswerable hand. To send plain language on a distress (or any) frequency was, so the Manual of Persecution said, an offence to be tried by court martial, but as far as he knew, all official stations had either closed down for the night or were too far away to receive it. So La Belle Dame Sans Merci also went singing hundreds of miles out into darkness, perhaps reaching the soul of the man who wrote it and maybe also touching the source of golden fire that sent down these words to him in the first place. Dots and dashes went out at a steady workman-like speed, all poetic rhythms contained, even in the sending of one word. The mast top of the transmitter high above the trees outside propagated the chirping noises of his morse, as if releasing cages of birds into freedom.

  CHAPTER 20

  After a tea of sausages and beans he raced upstairs to get changed. “Tek yer bleddy sweat,” the old man called, when his workboots bashing on the wooden stairs caused the wireless to crackle.

  Trousers and jacket hung on a chair-back: a suit his mother had got second-hand for six bob up Alfreton Road, utility blue with faint pin-stripes, shining at joints and not a turn-up in sight. But a suit was a suit and there was a tie and white shirt to make him spruce after a day mixing alum and flour at the shit-smelling pastebins—and five bob in his pocket out of the two pound wage-packet he’d given up downstairs. Stripping off boots and overalls, he whistled a wild jig set to the lyrics of a carefree Friday. The double bed under the window he shared with Arthur and Fred, though he as the eldest had charge of the room. In one corner was a cupboard holding his books, a hundred and thirty-seven, with a list of titles and authors pinned inside, and LONG LIVE STALIN AND RUSSIA chalked up in Russian on the back of the other door—words of magic made up by him from a Russian grammar asked for at the library a few months back. Opposite the window was a desk knocked together as a special favour by the old man, skilfully botched from packing cases and painted dark brown. Above hung a map of eastern Europe, its battleline marked by a band of pencilling. Soon it would be useless, for the grey tide of his constant rubbings-out had edged far towards Poland and Rumania, though in his cupboard was a folded map of western Europe which would complete the picture of Germany throttled—providing the Yanks and British got cracking with that second front.

  He opened the cupboard, proud of his collection of books, though he’d read few of them. The combined bulk and story of The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables had kept his desire for reading away from the rest of the stood-up spines. Nevertheless, their existence gave some feeling of refuge from what tempests now and again sprang up (for no reason that he could see) in his brain. Most of the books had been stolen from a shop down town, brought from its endless shelves to the light of day under his shirt, often two or three at a time, costing maybe five bob, while in his hand were a pair from the threepenny box he’d pay for at the office with a nondescript starvo look on his face. He acquired them by the simple action of walking in and walking out Saturday after Saturday, bricks for the building of a barricade against something and someone as yet unformulated and nameless. Shelves grew, became classified into Languages, Fiction, and Travel, made a distinguished graphline along their tops as if to hold down the sombre colours of uneven spines. To run his fingers along them would mean washing his hands again before going out, with the risk of marking his white shirt that he was now pulling over his bare chest.

  The books hadn’t been added to for more than a year, though the mood came easily back in which they had been stolen. Standing in the downstairs department where he couldn’t be seen, he had slid each week’s choices one by one between the undone buttons of his shirt. The smell of damp paper from row upon row of cellar-stored books was pungent in wet weather almost to the pitch of ammonia, and the coal fire burning in the corner grate of another room through the archway only seemed to make it more intense. He spent half an hour of search and excitement, a bliss in which he was lost, heightened by the stark fact reaching at him now and again that sooner or later he would have to load up and walk with them into the street, and for three hundred yards to the bus stop expect the manager’s cold hand to tap him on the shoulder and say: “Would you mind taking them books out of your shirt and coming with me to the cop-shop?” He went through the threepenny boxes, the sixpenny tables, the more expensive shelves, marking possibilities for his short list, and hoping other customers walking about wouldn’t buy them in the meantime.

  There were rare occasions when no books interested him, and once, so firm was the procedure fixed in the ammoniac smell of the shop that he nevertheless came out with a French hymnbook, a Hindustani grammar, and a set of nautical tables, feeling as relieved and happy with his load at the bus stop as if they were books he had wanted
to get his hands on for years.

  He browsed through the boxes, looking at each title, opening the covers of some, knowing that sooner or later he must slide out the books he wanted—three, and sometimes as many as four or five if they were thin ones—and make off with them. In the far-off days when he paid for the books—no more than threepence each, though—he came one Saturday morning with Bert and browsed while his cousin impatiently flipped through the magazine table. Brian took his time, was at the mercy of his title-chasing eyes and page-checking fingers, so that the minutes ran into Bert’s brain and needled him to find Brian and say: “Got owt yet?” “These two”—he held them up, also picked out a guide to Belgium: “I’d like this as well, but it’s half a dollar.” “Let’s get going then you’re ready,” Bert said, “or we’ll miss the picture.” Hold on a bit, Brian was going to say—but his mood broke and he turned: “Let’s scram, then.” At the picture-house queue Bert handed him the book he’d wanted but couldn’t afford. “You’re my favourite pal,” he said, gripping his shoulders tight. “Here y’are: I’d do owt for yo’.” Brian was overjoyed, clutched at the small red book, bent its flexible gold-lettered covers, and saw its marbled pages. “Thanks, our Bert. I sha’n’t forget a favour like this.”

  He didn’t: from that moment he never looked back as he stood by the shelves in the bookshop cellar department. Though feeling as if he were visible to all, since the tremble of hands and knock of knees seemed to give him a luminous shining quality, his fingers nevertheless hooked slyly out to the target his blue eyes fixed on. He stood without courage but with the gamble of a green-eyed cat on his shoulder, set in the circle of irresistible temptation, his fierce and quietly burning purpose to augment the bookshelves in his room while leaving the reading of them to whims of boredom and curiosity. His eyes were lights of panic, though kept quiet by an inner will which made his hands accurate in their sly split-second motion of simple extension and drawing-back loaded with a prize towards his shirt. One, two, three—they were safely in, and he walked up the stairs, not thinking about what was hidden between shirt-cloth and chest-flesh for fear he would fall top-heavy back and break his neck with guilt crash-bang at the stair bottom. With an abstracted air, as if dazed legitimately by the jewelled sight of so many books, he handed his pair of threepennies to the girl assistant, mumbling: “How much?” “Sixpence,” she said, and he thanked God at the first whiff of outside fresh air and petrol fumes, letting himself free into the roar and shoulder-knocks of Saturday crowds.