Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

  “However, we mustn’t underestimate this Communist threat to Malaya. They possess a highly efficient, well-organized, and strictly disciplined army, moving in battle formation and receiving orders from well-equipped and well-camouflaged headquarters, staffed by experienced officers. Their idea is to strangle Malaya’s rubber production, to render the country a dead loss economically, and destroy the conditions of civilization built up patiently by the British during the last hundred and fifty years.

  “Effective measures are being taken to meet this menace.…”

  Awkward questions came at the end, such as: “Since this looks like a popular uprising, wouldn’t it be better for the British to clear out before too much blood is shed?” And: “Would it be so bad to the British economy if Malaya was lost?” The lecturer answered with calmness and intelligence, though some noise came from people at the back of the hall who wanted him to know they weren’t convinced. A Scottish cook from Glasgow next to Brian said that his MP was a Communist, so wouldn’t it be wrong to say that all Communists were evil? “So’s mine,” a Londoner said. “Piratin’s his name, and my old man voted for him.” The lecture was brought to a close by a few words on the difference between Communists who are elected into power (as in England) and those who try to take a country over by violence against the wishes of the majority (as in Malaya).

  Rifles were carried into the billet, locked along a rack with a piece of wire threaded through each trigger-guard. The key to the padlock was kept in the pocket of a corporal who happened to be a heavy sleeper so that Brian wondered how quickly they’d get into action if the camp were rushed one dark and peaceful night. “If he sleeps that deep,” Kirkby said, “maybe we could nick the key and flog the rifles to the bandits. We could all go on a spree then.”

  “If you did that, the best thing you could do,” Baker said, “would be to make a getaway over the border to Bangkok.”

  “In any case,” someone called to Kirkby, “it’d be stealing”—so that he could only re-state his one rule of existence: “If you see owt moving, screw it. If you can’t screw it, sell it. If you can’t sell it, set fire to it.”

  Brian showered and changed before going to meet Mimi at the Boston Lights, walked cool and spruced-up towards the camp exit. The first stars were out, and spreading palmtops were still silhouetted against dark blue above. Behind came noises from the camp, and he paused at the grass to light a cigarette while a lorry turned from the gate and raced off to the airstrip. Malayan police were on guard, and a few rickshaws were hanging about for fares to the village. A sudden weird noise grew into the air, like some inspired madman trying to play a tune on a wartime siren. It began from down the road, an alien music dominating the quiet fall of a Malayan sunset. Brian’s shoulder blades and the tips of his fingers shivered with an unnatural electric coolness, and the wailing came louder through the tunnel of the trees. Other people stopped to see the advent of this monster that progressed towards them on two hundred marching feet, with the head of a dozen pipers making their instruments squeal and wail as they ate into the head and neck of them. “They’re Ghurkas,” somebody cried. A group of Malays and Chinese stood by the gate and watched them wheel in: men tramping back from the dead, biting out on their dark flowers of music a tune from the underworld. They formed up between the canteen and billets, pipers still playing as the infantry marked time. The final yell of “Halt”—stopping the rise and fall of their automaton feet like the throw of a switch—seemed to transform the atmosphere of the camp from that of apprehensive gaiety into one of total war.

  At the Boston, Brian bought a row of tickets and sat out the dances with Mimi. He got talking about the future and, before he realized his mistake, was too far in to withdraw. “It’d be easy for me to stay out here, instead of going back to England,” he said across the table—obviously at a time when she didn’t want to hear such things, when the tin-pot band crashing away close by was determined, it seemed, to override him. Mimi, looking young and pretty and painted up to the nines, pushed her handbag away, then worried it bit by bit back to her stomach, staring straight before her, so that it fell on to her knees: “It would be the hardest thing for you to do. You talk too nice about it. And you know I don’t like it as well.”

  “Stop nailing me,” he said, draining his thimble-sized whisky. “I only say what I mean.” Her face was blank with sadness (or was it weariness? he wondered), yet he thought a smile lurked somewhere behind her eyes. I’m getting drunk, he said to himself during a smile of tenderness that brought her hand out to touch his wrist.

  She said: “Maybe you’re afraid to go back to England.” The band, after a pause, slonked out another series of foxtrots, debilitating for all and sundry—yet enjoyed—in the heavy sweat of the evening. “You’re dead wrong,” he cried, with such positive conviction that, remembering it later, he wondered whether or not there wasn’t some truth in it. She turned her eyes down. “If I don’t know my own mind at twenty, I’ll never know it,” he said. He called a waiter and asked for two more whiskies, but Mimi insisted on an orange squash. She took only soft drinks whenever their talk got “serious”—whereas he went to the other extreme of whisky, the result being that while his seriousness tended to become more erratic on the loosening fire induced, Mimi grew more and more into her melancholic, fatalistic self—leaving them in the end at emotional loggerheads. At the same time he suspected that no mere earthly decision, such as the one they were trying to solve now, was really vital to her life, which seemed to work on a level where decisions were left—and trusted—to look after themselves, whether you scorched yourself with rice whisky or sat through them with an iced squash. He sensed all this, and the foregone conclusions it implied, yet in the packed dance hall, facing her and having his head pounded out of shape with smash-hits murdered by the Boston Lights Brainwashers, he wasn’t so sure he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in the fabulous sunlight of Malaya. “Our demob group was called before the CO today, and quizzed about staying on in the air force another two years. I could always accept.”

  “No, you couldn’t,” she said. “You don’t belong in a uniform. I know something about you after all this time.” Maybe she did, at that. The CO asked if he’d any complaints to make against the air force now that he was (in a month) about to leave. “None, sir,” he answered. Who’d be such a loon as to say he had? “Well,” the CO went on, a set speech made to everybody, “we need all the trained men we can get in Malaya at this difficult time, and according to the signals officer you’re one of his best wireless operators. Would you like to stay an extra two years?” This question wasn’t unexpected either: Baker had been in before him and came out with a look of insult on his livid face. So Brian had his answer, a telegram already worded in his brain: “No, sir”—a pause—“I wouldn’t.” The CO’s face, dead but for the handlebar moustache, registered the “I wouldn’t.” “You can go then, Seaton,” he rapped out.

  “If I signed on,” he said to Mimi, “I might be able to help the Communists.”

  She smiled: “They don’t want much help at the moment.”

  “They might in a few months. You never know.”

  “Nearly everybody’s on their side in Malaya,” she said.

  “I hope they win, then. They’ve even got their own radio station, haven’t they? They try to jam our WT channels with a transmitter. I was told to get a bearing on it yesterday so that our planes could track it down and bomb it, but I didn’t get a very accurate one. Far from it,” he laughed.

  “This war’s nothing to do with you,” she said. “You should get out as quickly as you can.”

  “Not much, it ain’t. I was dragged into the air force against my will and now they want me to fight the Communists. I’m no mug. I’ve learned a thing or two in my life. They can fight their wars themselves.” She touched him with her foot: two Chinese were listening from the next table. They turned to their own talk, and he called the waiter for more drinks.

  “As I wa
s saying,” he peeled off another day’s pay, “I can stay in Malaya if I like.” She looked hard at him, and he knew that, for a change, he was more puzzling to her than she had ever been to him, that she wanted him to act and not involve her in the complex machinery of his decisions. “If I decide to stay in Malaya, we can get married.”

  “You can’t marry me. You never could, and you know it.”

  The whisky, music, voices, and moving colour around their table, a circular light of agonized intimacy created by the opposite poles of their personality (light and dark for him; dark and light for her), mixed into a flood that he bent his head nearer the table to avoid. “You’re wrong,” he cried. “For Christ’s sake, you’re wrong, because I’d like that more than anything.”

  She reminded him of something he’d never told her and didn’t know she knew: “You’ve got a wife and child waiting for you in England,” and the shock was so great that no quick lie came to his rescue. He sat with mouth closed and a grim stare in his eyes. “You thought I didn’t know!” He was surprised at her treating as flippant a piece of deception that a Radford woman might have choked him for. “I’ve known for months. I happened to be dancing one night with someone from Kota Libis who told me all about you. I thought you knew I knew. You never bothered to tell me you were married, out of kindness, I imagined.”

  “That’s true,” he said, a little too quickly, though sensing that the river of gaiety loped around them by the dance hall was coming to the end of its tether, about to lay down its head and die—except that there was no diminution in the machine-like power of the band. Mimi’s motionless expression was one of unhappiness, and he felt miserable and guilty that he hadn’t kept his trap shut—or at least hadn’t opened it in the right way—and spent the six tickets on spinning themselves off their feet.

  He pulled her into the perspiring drink-smelling mix-up of the dance-floor, giving in to the honky-tonk jazz of the Boston Stumpers. Her hands rested lightly, as if she were a taxi-dancer approached for the first time. His movements while dancing were those of some sailor who had never taken lessons, and he used the same erratic and exaggerated steps for all rhythms. Yet their bodies moved together and he drew her slowly to him. With a sudden movement, she clung firmly, as if some inner vision frightened her. “Brian,” she faltered, “don’t go, will you?”

  “No.” They pressed warmly together, close to the dark night of each other. His arm was so far around her waist that his fingers touched the under-part of her breast. Noise and music were forgotten, stranded in a world they had sidestepped from, its fabricated rhythms alien and unmatched compared to the swaying cutoff warmth of themselves. He felt the shape and benefit of her body, thighs intertwining at each step, shoulders and breasts against his. “I love you,” he said. “I feel as though I’ve lived with you for years, for a life.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s not finished yet, is it?”

  He kissed her closed eyes: “What are you crying for?”—misery back and making a lump of stone in his guts, impossible to get rid of because space for it had been there since birth, it seemed. Her forehead creased and lips twisted into a childlike ugliness that she tried to hide. A haze of noise and whisky defeated him, turned easily back the sudden though matter-of-fact intrusions of traffic and ships’ hooters from beyond the world of the Boston Lights. Into it came Knotman, framed at the far door with his gorgeous bint—a black flower, smiling as they pushed a pathway to the bar. Mimi and Brian went into another dance, and were drawn tightly to each other: “You’re making me dizzy,” she protested. “I’ll be sick.”

  “Save it for the ferry. Are you going back with me?”

  “You know I am.”

  They were cheerful by the end of the dance, stayed on for another. “You’re thinner than when I first knew you,” she said. “Your bones are sticking out.”

  “That’s your fault; you’re like a magnet and they’re trying to get at you.”

  “You’re crazy,” she laughed. “It’s impossible.”

  “Crazy,” he said, “like a blind, three-legged blackclock.”

  “What’s a blackclock?”

  “A cockroach. An English shit-beetle.”

  “Do they have them in England as well?”

  “Sure they do. They have snakes in England, jungle and wild animals and mountains. Cities and swamps and big rivers. You look as if you don’t believe me? Well, I can’t prove it this minute, but it’s true, right enough.”

  “If it is, why do you want to stay in Malaya?”

  “Because”—even if you don’t have an answer, make one up, a lie being better than no answer at all. If when he was a kid his brothers or cousins had asked: What is the biggest town in Australia? he’d rather have said Paris than I don’t know. “Because I love you.”

  But still the tears came, for no lie could stop them, nor even the truth, since what he had said was certainly somewhere between both. “When I was told you had a wife in England I didn’t believe it. I thought the man was lying or having me on. But now you’ve told me as well, it must be true.” He winced at the delayed action of her trick, unable to answer the cunning of a fine ruse played as much against herself as him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but it was too late. He had lifted her from a passive sort of contentment, and understood that she couldn’t forgive him. “I’ll stay,” he said. “I want to. I can’t do anything else,” and while they were dancing he imagined them living in some house like the Chinese widow’s, on the edge of the Patani swamps, where bullfrogs and night noises rolled an extinguishing carpet over her senses, an oblivious rest for them both from the strident thump and blare of the band that was beginning to send him off his nut.

  The next morning those who had been on the Gunong Barat expedition were awakened at five o’clock. The hand of a police sergeant from the guard-room shook Brian out of the death-cells of sleep, lifted the millstone of exhaustion from his head. He’d been home with Mimi and stayed till two, had run the gauntlet of roadblocks between the village and camp, thankful at reaching his bed with no marks of buck-shot on him. It was a feat of tracking, often on all fours by beach and footpath to avoid the groups of Malays who sat smoking and telling tales to each other, alerted for any bandit gang, of whom Brian might have been one. It’s getting worse, he had told himself. If I don’t get shot by mistake, they’ll report me to the guard-house for being out without a pass. I feel like a Chetnik freedom-fighter; or I would with a gun to blaze back with if they tried owt.

  “Get up,” the sergeant said. “Out of that wanking pit. There’s a job for you jungle lads to do.”

  “What’s going off?” Brian suspected a practical joke. “It’s still dark.”

  “A plane’s crashed and you’ve got to go after it.” He stirred Kirkby, Baker, Jack, and a boy from Cheshire. “Come on, get yer hands off it. The ship’s going down.”

  Brian sat up, but made no move to get out of bed, while Knotman walked along the billet already dressed: “Get weaving. We’ve got to help those poor bastards down. They’re fixing lorries and wireless gear at the MT section.” Brian pulled his trousers on: “Why did the daft bastards have to crash at a time like this? I’ve never felt so knackered in my life.”

  “I suppose you’re getting as much of it in as you can,” Knotman said, “before they drag you screaming down to that boat at Singapore.”

  “I wish that was what they was waking me up for this morning.”

  Knotman threw him a fag. “I’ll go over to signals in a bit and find out where it pancaked.”

  The sergeant returned: “Look sharp. Get over to the cookhouse and they’ll give you some breakfast and rations.”

  “How long do they expect us to be away?” Baker wanted to know.

  “How do I know, laddie?” the sergeant cried. “I’ll get God on the blower and find out, if it means that much to you.”

  “It does,” Baker said. “We’re on the boat in a couple of weeks.”

  “GET WEAVING!” he
shouted. “Or you’ll be over the wall for fifty-six days, never mind on the bloody boat.” They went down the steps and walked off through the palm-trees to a leisurely meal, still finding time to hang around in the billet afterwards. Brian was impatient. “They’re fixing the radio,” Knotman explained. “I got on to the DF hut and the plane ducked thirty miles south, they think.”

  “In the meantime,” Brian said, “the poor bastards are hanging in the trees, bleeding to death.” He lifted a Bible from the locker of the next bed, opened it, and put his finger on a random verse to find what the future held, a trick he’d seen in a film a few nights ago: “And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.” Among the people. What people? A loony game. I can’t make head or tail of it, and in any case I’m not superstitious. His filled pack lay tilted by the bed, this time weighing no more than forty pounds. He was also to collect a medium-range TR, if the mechanics could get it working before they left, for it was the only one at the camp. He flicked open the Bible, again thrust his finger on to a verse: “And they cut off his head.…” It kept opening at the same place because the binding was faulty, and would open there till the cows came home—unless he deliberately avoided it, which somehow he didn’t want to do because the more he read it, the more some hidden truth seemed to lurk at the heart of it. He half-understood its meaning by the time the driver poked his head in and bawled out that they were ready to go.