The Empire Trilogy (123 page)

‘What did you say?' asked Walter casually, doing his best to conceal his surprise: this was the first he had heard of such a deal. He was certain that none of the other producers or dealers in Singapore was aware of it. Nor had he heard anything from his friends on the Committee. In fact, he could hardly believe that it was true; it seemed more likely that Ehrendorf had made a mistake. Ehrendorf repeated what he had said: he had heard it from someone at the consulate. ‘By the way,' he added cheerfully, ‘it's supposed to be a secret so please keep it to yourself. Careless talk can cost jobs as well as lives.'

‘Of course,' agreed Walter blandly, and then to change the subject asked: ‘What did you do to your hand?' Ehrendorf's left hand was bandaged.

‘Oh, it's nothing. Just a burn.' Walter was on the point of asking him now he had done it but, on second thoughts, decided not to pursue the matter. An uncomfortable silence prevailed for a few moments until at last Joan's footstep was heard on the stairs.

In March Ehrendorf's prediction was proved correct when news came that the Committee had agreed to an offer for a further 100,000 tons. This gave Walter food for thought. A day or two earlier Joan had confided in him that she had now definitely decided to see no more of Ehrendorf. He was getting on her nerves! She was going to clear the decks! And yet, Walter realized, this might not be altogether convenient for himself because it so happened that there was something about the American attitude to the buying of rubber which he badly wanted to know. And it seemed possible that Ehrendorf might be able to tell him.

For some months Walter had been aware that sooner or later difficulties would arise over the fact that the Reserve Company, though given the job of piling up vast quantities of rubber, was being constantly outbid by the big American companies. Why, of 140,000 tons at present afloat for America, the Reserve Company's share was a paltry 5,000 tons! This situation, with the American Government increasingly biting its nails over its reserve stocks, could not be expected to last. Already the first hints were reaching Singapore that the American authorities were on the point of taking some remedial action. Walter was anxious to know what that action would be before it was actually taken.

There was only one thing to be done. Though he did not like to interfere in Joan's private affairs (except, of course, where a potential husband might be concerned) Walter decided to explain his predicament to his daughter. She listened carefully to what he had to say and once again he was pleased by her quick grasp of business matters. ‘I can't promise, of course, but it might just happen that we learned something that would do the firm a power of good.'

‘A reprieve has been granted!' declared Joan, smiling. ‘What a lucky man he is to have you pleading his cause!'

Walter did not consider himself a person easily given to self-doubt and discouragement: vigorous initiative was more his cup of tea. But sometimes these days he could not avoid the feeling that his familiar world was crumbling away at an alarming rate. No doubt the Japanese were at the root of a great deal of the present trouble in the Far East: since 1937 a veritable blizzard of edicts designed to cripple European and American interests in China had come from their puppet Government in Peking. Foreign trade had been progressively frozen out and replaced by Japanese monopolies. Look at the huge cigarette factory currently being built in Peking by the Manchuria Tobacco Company, a sinister edifice indeed when you remembered that non-Japanese cigarettes were already subject to a special discriminatory tax throughout Inner Mongolia! Or consider the way the Japanese had taken over the Peking—Mukden and Peking—Suiyan Railways without paying a cent of the interest these railways owed to the foreign bondholders who had financed them, not to mention the havoc they were wreaking throughout China with their military currency. Nor had Blackett and Webb been spared: their import-export trade with Shantung, which had once gone through Tsingtao, had been driven from there by penal anti-Western restrictions to Weihaiwei, only to have the same restrictions follow hot on their heels. Walter did not particularly blame the Japanese for taking what they could get, but he did blame the British Government for allowing them to do so with impunity.

But even without the Japanese Walter believed that his familiar world would still have been crumbling. The strikes of the past decade had changed the whole complexion of Malaya. Serious strikes had continued: Walter doubted now whether they would ever stop. The rise in the cost of living brought about by the outbreak of the war in Europe was the present cause: the workers were aware that profits had risen, too. Five months ago (December 1940) two and a half thousand tappers in the Bahau Rompin area had struck, claiming a daily rate of $1.10 for a task of 350 to 400 trees. The estate manager had promptly paid them off, which meant that they lost the barrack accommodation on the estate that went with the job. They had set up a makeshift camp in Bahau Town. When the police had come to arrest the ring-leaders a few days later crowds sympathetic to the workers had confronted them. Ugly scenes had developed in the course of which the police had opened fire, killing three workers.

Nor was that the end of it, nor likely to be for years to come, in Walter's view. At this very moment, while he sat eating lunch in the Cricket Club with a colleague, Indian workers in the Klang District were on strike. If you had tried to tell old Webb that one day Indian estate workers would take to this strike game he would not have believed you. Indian workers, though paid less than Chinese, were habitually docile and respectful of authority. And yet now they were having to quell them with police and troops! Many of Walter's friends at the Singapore Club were amazed at this change of spots by the Indian workers, but not Walter. He had been expecting it for some time. Because now, he knew, the changed atmosphere in the country would permit such things to happen. The old order of things was as dead as a doornail. Walter sighed and dipped a silver spoon into the pudding which crouched on his plate, a solid moulding of greyish tapioca with coconut milk and a thin, dark syrup.
Gula Malacca!
How that cool taste stirred memories of the old days in Singapore!

His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a ‘boy' with a telephone message which had been relayed from his office: Mr Webb's condition had taken a turn for the worse. Would he come at once? Walter, perhaps in the grip of nostalgia, had drunk several beers and, unusually for him, did not feel altogether sober. He glanced around the room as he stood up: many of the other diners were in uniform and he thought : ‘I'd better not fall over and make an ass of myself in front of this crowd!' But he managed without difficulty to negotiate the door and the hallway in a dignified manner. It was outside on the steps, beneath the red-brick Victorian portico, that he almost had a serious collision with a tall, thin and rather chinless Army officer who was entering the Club. The officer's disapproving expression intensified into a grimace of annoyance as Walter, to prevent himself plunging head first down the steps, grasped a thin arm in its rolled-up khaki sleeve. A glance at those blue eyes and tentative moustache was enough. Although Walter, for preference, did not consort with military men he recognized this one immediately. For it was none other than General Percival who had recently taken over the military command from General Bond (Bond's rival, Babington, had been replaced, too). But this General Percival, to Walter's bleary eye, looked a scarcely more encouraging prospect than his predecessor.

‘Silly fool! Why don't you watch where you're going?' muttered Walter under his breath as he let go of the General and hurried on down the steps in search of his car.

Before he could find it, however, he recognized a familiar figure also in uniform approaching from the direction of the Victoria Memorial Hall. It was Ehrendorf. Walter hailed him and they exchanged a few words; Walter was barely able to conceal his impatience. He declined Ehrendorf's offer of a
stengah
, explaining that he must hurry to Mr Webb's bedside as it seemed that the old man's long resistance might now be coming to an end.

‘By the way,' Walter permitted himself to enquire at last, ‘did you hear any more about the new buying arrangements for the Reserve Company?'

‘Why, yes, as a matter of fact.' Ehrendorf looked somewhat uncomfortable at the question. ‘I guess I can rely on you to keep it to yourself!' Walter reassured him, trying to seem casual.

‘Buying is to be centralized … no more private deals. All rubber exports to the United States are to be licensed. Licences will only be issued for shipping through the central buying agency and for fulfilling any outstanding forward contracts.'

‘I see,' said Walter. ‘That's interesting. Outstanding orders will go through? When will it begin?'

Ehrendorf did not know. ‘In a few days, I suppose.'

Walter said goodbye to Ehrendorf and climbed into the back seat of the Bentley. ‘Mohammed,' he said presently to the
syce
, ‘I would like you to drop me at Collyer Quay and then to go to the Mayfair with a message for Major Archer. Tell him that I have been delayed by a very serious matter but will come as soon as I can.' He sat back, satisfied with his decision. It was one, he knew, with which old Mr Webb would have been in perfect sympathy.

As it turned out, although it was evening before Walter had at last finished sending cables and reached the Mayfair, there had been no particular need to hurry: his old friend and partner still had not succumbed. Nor, for that matter, did there appear to have been any great change in his condition. Mr Webb still lay there, breathing noisily in his illuminated tent of white muslin. The Major explained, however, that the old man had gone through a crisis of some sort about mid-day, had appeared restless, and several times had repeated the word ‘sun' and a number of other words too garbled to be understood, at least by the Major.

‘But the interesting thing was,' he told Walter, ‘that Vera Chiang, who was here at the time, thought she understood that he was trying to say: “Sun Yat-sen”.'

‘Nonsense!' cried Walter. ‘The old boy just wanted to go and prune his roses in the nude. He didn't give tuppence for Sun Yat-sen.' And clapping the Major cheerfully on the back Walter strode off, chuckling, through the compound in the direction of his own house; but as he went a grim thought came stealing after him through the hushed garden and pounced on him before he had reached the safety of his own walls: ‘This is how we all end up, mumbling rubbish to people who interpret it as they want!'

On the evenings that followed, while Mr Webb, now mute again, continued to lie there, and on through June, July and August of 1941, Walter's nostalgia for the old Singapore became acute. Perhaps this was paradoxical for in the old days, about which he was less and less able to resist holding forth to Major Archer at his dying partner's bedside, business had never boomed the way it was booming now. But in those days the atmosphere had been different, more relaxed … no, it was not simply youth, though being young undoubtedly had something to do with it. No, it was the place itself. Singapore had been different in those days. Business had been an adventure, not the grim striving for advantage it had become latterly. They had been as if on a different time scale: everything had seemed to happen more slowly, more comfortably.

Walter paused, staring up as if for enlightenment at the grey metallic blur of the ceiling fan and then down again at the billowing cocoon of the mosquito net within which lay old Mr Webb (soon to be hatched out into a better world). At one time in Singapore everyone had known everyone. Those were the days of great rambling colonial houses where the tradition of lavish hospitality lingered on from the nineteenth century. Ah well, all that had gone with the wind. In the course of time the bachelor messes, too, which the merchant houses kept going for their young chaps, had been replaced by blocks of flats. And once they had disappeared all the fun that young men used to have in the tropics had disappeared with them.

It was the development of Singapore as a great naval and military base which had started the rot. People who had no real connection with the country had flooded in. The Military had their uses, he went on, forgetting that the Major himself had been a military man in his day, but they were nomads, here today and gone tomorrow, never bothering to get to know the people or the country. What was the result of this influx? Simply that the old feeling of space and tranquillity which used to make Singapore such a pleasant place to live in had gone, and gone for ever.

‘Sylvia and I used to motor thirty or forty miles sometimes in our pyjamas to have supper with friends in Johore. That's what I call a comfortable way to live!'

And the Major, though he would have preferred to discuss Japan's increasingly threatening attitude in the sphere of international politics, was obliged to confess that going to a dinnerparty in pyjamas did sound to him the very model of a life of contentment: obviously in those days there was no risk of meeting maddened hordes of strikers waving
parangs.

The Singapore Club in the old days was not, declared Walter on another visit a few weeks later (forestalling the Major's attempt to ask him what he thought of Roosevelt's proposal, just announced, that French Indo-China should be considered a neutral country from which Japan could get food and raw materials; the Major had got on well with old Mr Webb and sorely missed his chairman's forceful views on perplexing world topics), no, it was not the mixing pot of all ages and conditions it had since become, no sir! Nowadays you might find yourself rubbing shoulders with any young twerp just out from England or some other fellow whose too careful public school accent might slip from time to time exposing heaven knew what dubious origins. But then it had been truly exclusive, the sort of place frequented by the older and more influential men in the Colony, reserved exclusively for males, of course, except for New Year's Day when ladies were invited for lunch to eat the traditional dish: Pheasant Lucullus! Yes, the Singapore Club used to be the lair of the
Tuan Besar
, like this poor old chap here, and it was quite a daunting prospect for a young man to go and visit him in it.