The Empire Trilogy (190 page)

‘What?' demanded Walter. ‘Are you talking to me?' But the voice had faded once more into the ghostly plucking of a harp. And anyway, it must have been someone else called Walter.

On the other hand, Walter realized suddenly, there was probably no need to worry about the rubber, at least for the moment. For there was so much of it, several thousand tons. Unless they had some mad idea of burning down the buildings as well, which was surely not the case, the PWD busybodies would need several weeks merely to shift the rubber from the godowns to a suitable site for burning. The same was probably true of other commodities which Blackett and Webb held in their godowns. It was evident that what was most at risk was the investment in engineering and motor-assembly plants. It was that which would need protection. It was that which the PWD men would go for first.

But oddly enough, as it turned out, they did not. They went for Walter's liquor godown at the docks. A telephone message chased him round the city, warning him. He could no longer bear to sit in the improvised offices in Tanglin surrounded by a staff which had by now shrunk, thanks to the demands of the passive defence services, to an efficient young Cantonese, a couple of elderly Englishmen who but for the war would long since have been put out to grass, and two or three Eurasian typists. So, despite the danger, Walter had himself driven about the city inspecting the various Blackett and Webb premises and offering a word of encouragement to whatever staff remained (for here, too, the number of his employees was shrinking daily, almost hourly). Mohammed, his
syce
, did not seem to mind: he, too, seemed anxious to pursue his normal life.

Although he seldom stayed for more than a few minutes at each place he visited, it now took so long to cross the ruined city that the better part of Walter's day was spent in the car, an ancient Alvis which Mohammed had found somewhere. Monty had evidently succeeded in getting both himself and the Bentley away on the
Félix Roussel.
Apart from faint surprise that the boy should have had sufficient initiative, Walter had no strong feelings about his son's desertion. On the whole he was better out of the way. Once or twice, though, staring out with sightless eyes at the boiling streets, the thought of Harvey Firestone's five efficient sons made him clench his fists and caused the bristles to stir on his spine. How promising life had once appeared, how disastrously it had turned out!

Even the city now was hardly recognizable any longer as the place where he had spent such a great part of his life. The roads were clogged with military vehicles, there were gun emplacements every few yards, each crossroads seemed to have its own traffic jam which sweating military policemen were trying to free. And everywhere he looked he saw bomb-craters and rubble, shattered trees, uprooted lamp-posts, tangled tramway cables, and smoke from the buildings burning on every side. With the smoke there came, barely noticeable at first, a disagreeable smell. Old Singapore hands like Walter were used to unpleasant smells: they came from everywhere … from the drains and from the river above all, but also from less likely places, from Tanglin rose-gardens for instance, where the ‘boys' sometimes failed to bury properly the household excrement, or someone's spaniel dug it up again. In Singapore you could never be quite safe: even while you stood smiling fixedly under the great candelabra in the ballroom at Government House, once a gift from the Emperor Franz Josef to the third Duke of Buckingham, you might suddenly get a distinct whiff of something disagreeable. But this was different. This was altogether more sickening. It seemed to cling to your hair and clothes. When you took out your handkerchief to blow your nose it was there, too. Presently, it became stronger and not even the swirling smoke could disguise the fact that it came from the bodies stretched in rows on the pavements which no one had yet had time to bury.

Tired of the endless delays and traffic jams on the way to Tanglin, Walter had a camp bed and a desk installed in the disused store-keeper's office in the godown on the river where he had brought Joan one day not very long ago. Thank heaven that she and Nigel had got away, at any rate! This little office, which was really just a box of wood and glass without a roof other than that of the godown itself way above, had strong associations for Walter, reminding him of the old days. It was peaceful here, too, and very quiet. The dim light, the smell of the raw rubber which rose in tiers, bale upon bale, to the dim heights of the roof, he found infinitely soothing. There was a window, too, in the office from which he could contemplate the river, not so very different even now from the river he had gazed at as a young man from this spot. He needed this tranquillity to restore and refresh himself after his wanderings in the city.

And still the city's collapse had not yet reached a limit which one could consider, however dreadful it might be, a stable state. On the contrary, familiar streets continued at an accelerating pace to be eaten away by fire and to crumble beneath the bombs and shells. A huge mushroom of black smoke had risen to the north: he paused to look at it from a window of the Singapore Club where he went for lunch. It issued, he was told, from the oil storage tanks at the Naval Base, to which fire had been set to prevent the Japanese capturing the fuel they so badly needed. From the Fullerton Building you looked over Anderson Bridge and the river, then an open space with an obelisk and the solid pile, now distinctly battered, of the Victoria Memorial Hall and Theatre and, away to the right, what might have been the two friendly onion domes of the Arab Community Arch. The smoke had risen on a fat, black stalk which, from where Walter was looking at it, grew just beside the clock tower though in fact its source was on the northern coast: its mushroom cap was growing steadily and spreading to the south-east. Soon it would cover most of the city and, indeed, of the Island itself, snowing as it came a light precipitation of oily black smuts which clung to everything, blackening skin and clothing alike.

When they set out to make another journey after lunch, this time to the docks, Mohammed had to switch on the windscreen wipers on account of the black film of soot that crept over the windscreen. But nowadays one needed to be able to see, not only forward, but upwards as well, because of the Zeros that continually tore in over the shattered palms or floated like hawks up and down the main roads, waiting for something to stir beneath them. Mohammed, therefore, opened the sliding roof of the Alvis so that while he drove he could keep an eye out. He also glanced into his rear-view mirror once or twice, half expecting Walter to protest. But Walter sat mute. It was not very long before one or two black spots of soot began to appear on Walter's white linen suit. He tried to brush them off, but that only made them worse. Soon his suit, his shirt and his face were covered in oily black smudges.

The Japanese fighters were now flying so low in search of people or vehicles to machine-gun that troops, and sometimes even civilians who had picked up a weapon somewhere, would very often fire back from whatever cover they could find. Several times Walter and Mohammed were obliged to leave the Alvis in the road and dive for cover. On one occasion, before they had had time to take shelter, a two-engined Mitsubishi bomber blocked the sky and a burst of machine-gun bullets from its rear turret stitched along the brick wall above their heads, showering them with fragments. Meanwhile, from a sand-bagged gun emplacement beside them a steel-helmeted corporal blazed away with a bren-gun. It jammed. Cursing, he struck off the magazine with a blow of the back of his hand and clipped on a new one. Nearby stood a shattered army lorry in which sat a headless soldier still grasping the wheel.

Once Walter saw one of the fighter-planes hit by a fusillade from the streets and go out of control, crashing with a roar some way away into a steep wooded bank beside the Bukit Timah Road. Yet although he nodded to the jubilant Mohammed and smiled grimly at the cheering Tommies beside the road and muttered: ‘Well done … Good show!' he was not really interested. He was too preoccupied with other matters to care greatly whether a Japanese plane crashed or did not crash. And when one of the two elderly Englishmen on his staff came running after him as he was leaving for the liquor godown where the PWD men were about to start demolition work and asked him whether he would like to take a gun with him ‘just in case', he replied sharply: ‘Don't be absurd, man! We aren't going to take the law into our own hands.'

‘But I meant …' stammered the assistant, astonished.

In the matter of the destruction of liquor, Walter did even better than not taking the law into his own hands: he lent it his active support, ordering one of the remaining secretaries to telephone the
Tribune
and the
Straits Times
with instructions for them to send a photographer. His intention was to have himself photographed smashing the first bottle of whisky. In the event no photographer appeared. Nevertheless, he still insisted on smashing the first bottle.

‘We aren't here to launch a bloody ship, sir, you know,' said the Volunteer Engineers sergeant who had been seconded to the PWD. ‘We've got to get through all that lot and several more bonded warehouses as well. Not to mention the shops, clubs and hotels all over the place.' Walter nodded: he knew better than anyone how much liquor there must be on the Island. After all, Singapore was the distribution centre for the entire Far East. Blackett and Webb alone must have several tens of thousands of crates containing gin, whisky and wine; he could only guess that altogether there would be well over a million bottles of whisky belonging to various merchants and institutions in store or awaiting despatch from the Island, perhaps even more when one considered that the flow of spirits from Singapore into a number of Far Eastern ports had been dammed up for the past few weeks by the outbreak of war and the freezing of Japanese assets.

The demolition squad set to work on the cases with crowbars. Walter, thinking grimly of his jubilee year, obstinately grabbed a bottle out of the first case to be opened and smashed it violently at his feet.

‘Not here, sir, the fumes will do us in,' said the sergeant, assuming he wanted to help.

Walter fell back then and watched silently as the bottles were carried outside and smashed against the wall. Presently, in a sort of daze from the heat and the noise of the ack-ack guns, that distant slamming of doors that followed you everywhere in the city, he too picked up some bottles and smashed them against the wall. And he went on doing so, despite the heat. Soon he was obliged to take off his jacket: the sweat fell in salty drops from his chin and his shirt clung to his back. The other men had stripped to the waist but this Walter could not do, because of the bristles on his spine.

The smashing of these bottles filled him with a strange exultation. He felt he could go on doing it for ever. Whereas the other men, conserving their strength, merely made the effort required to break the bottles, Walter dashed them violently against the wall. Once, as he turned too quickly, he thought he saw two other men exchanging a sly grin at his expense, but he did not care. He went on and on. He ground his teeth and smashed and muttered and smashed until his head was ringing. A mound of glittering broken glass rose steadily against the wall and in no time he found himself sloshing back and forth through deep pools of whisky which had gathered on the concrete surface. Even here outside the alcohol fumes soon became oppressive. Once, as he was sloshing through a pool of Johnny Walker, he lost his balance and sat down, cutting his hand on one of the bottles he had been holding and which had broken. He got up immediately, revived by the sharp stinging of alcohol on the wound, and went on with the job, but more carefully now. He was getting tired.

A telephone had been ringing for some time in the storekeeper's office. A whispered conversation took place between Mohammed and the store-keeper who had been eyeing Walter uncertainly. Mohammed finally approached Walter to tell him that his office had rung, afraid that Walter might forget that he had an appointment with the directors of Langfield and Bowser. Mohammed would have liked to ask Walter if he was feeling all right, but did not quite dare. He stared blankly at Mohammed for a few moments. Then he said: ‘Oh yes, so I have. What time is it?'

When he had washed his face under a tap, and bound a handkerchief round his cut hand, he picked up his jacket and went outside to the car where Mohammed was waiting, holding the door open. As he made to get in he caught sight of his own reflection in the window. His shirt and trousers were black with smuts from the burning oil on the other side of the Island. He hesitated a moment, wondering whether he should first have driven himself to the Club to shower and change. But he was already late. Besides, there was a war on.

Langfield and Bowser's headquarters were in the Bowser Building on the corner of Cecil and Cross Streets. Had Solomon Langfield's house in Nassim Road not been devastated in the January air-raids they would most likely have moved their offices there, away from the centre of town, as Walter had done with his offices. As it was, on account of the sudden flowing back to Singapore of so many troops who had to be found billets, they had been unable to find convenient premises out of the danger zone. ‘All the safe places appear to have been hogged by the bloody Army,' the Secretary had explained to those anxious members of the board who had remained on the Island. They might have managed to find somewhere even so, thanks to old Solomon's cunning and contacts, had the Chairman not been abruptly called to his reward. That had thrown everything into confusion. The result was that here they still were, holding uneasy board meetings in the Bowser Building ‘in the thick of the action' as the Secretary put it. He belched dejectedly; for some reason everything he ate these days seemed to cause flatulence.

Meetings were now held as infrequently as possible, but unfortunately they could not be discontinued altogether: there was so much of importance that had to be discussed. They had been astonished and dismayed to hear of Nigel Langfield's proposed marriage to Joan Blackett and had spent many perilous hours attempting to predict its implications for themselves and their firm. If Walter Blackett got his hands on Nigel's stock or, what amounted to the same thing, got his hands on Nigel, then the future looked black indeed for Langfield and Bowser Limited. Walter would surely waste no time in diverting Langfield's most profitable business into Blackett and Webb's coffers, no doubt doing so with a wealth of plausible-sounding arguments about ‘rationalization'. But Langfield's worried directors, sitting around their board-room table in steel helmets and quivering with alarm at the menacing sounds that filtered in from outside, had no appetite for a dose of rationalism administered by Walter … at least, not if it meant what they thought it would mean.