The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (77 page)

The Dutch major had been flung clear by the explosion and actually landed on his feet. He stood in the middle of the street, shouting and shaking his fist at the gin-palace which retreated in a series of frantic leaps and bounds up the road, veering first to one side and then the other like an epileptic wallaby.

Orders were shouted in Dutch and English. Metal-shod army boots clattered on cobbles. Jhamboo was reassuring the civilians; the military assembled in the street. The Borderers spread out to guard the area while chaos was regularised.

Despite the havoc, only one man had been killed – the radio operator in the Dutch Jeep. One Ambonese had been shot in the upper arm. He was a meaty fellow. His mates brought him to sit in the grass against the wall. While his sergeant examined the wound, he smiled, showing white teeth. Several other people suffered minor scratches and grazes, nothing serious. The Dutch major declined to be examined.

The three-tonner was a write-off; we got the Jeeps to safety and let the trees burn.

With commanding calm, the Dutch padre returned to the graveside and completed the service. He finished by saying a few words in English.

‘Our duties here today are to those who passed over, but
we pray that the Lord will also bring comfort to the hearts of those who still frequent the scene of events. We all hope to gain life everlasting. Until such time, life is more important than death.'

Ernst would not have been displeased by the manner of his burial. I felt a prickling behind the eyes as we filed out of the cemetery, under the smouldering trees, where the stink of cordite lingered like an ugly perfume. The incident convinced me that I no longer had stomach for the incidents of war: it really was time to go home.

The radio operator had sent a warning message through before he died. As the last amens were said, fresh vehicles and troops arrived. A lieutenant directed them in pursuit of the enemy gin-palace. The mourners retired to the funeral parlour, which stood almost opposite the burial ground. First aid was given to the lightly wounded and big tots of genever to everyone. The Ambonese, of course, were left outside on guard. Jhamboo was the only non-white present in the parlour.

The general consensus of opinion was that my timely warning had saved everyone from following Sontrop and Co. into the grave. Drinks and big fat cigars were thrust upon me; I was engulfed in broken English and gold-toothed smiles. An aged aunt of Jan de Zwaan's, who had spent the war interned in a Jap prison camp, made everyone drink a toast to me. Shame rose red in my cheeks. If only they knew how the heart to fight, so strong in Assam, had left me! If they'd seen me
crying
in the go-down … I thanked them. When I announced that I was starting on the road back to England the next day, they cried and protested, and more drink went the rounds.

Jhamboo insisted on shaking my hand, too.

‘Acute observation on your part, Sergeant Stubbs. You add one more small detail to the heroism of the British and Indian armies. The Empire depends on such valour. Tomorrow, I shall break this wretched “O” Section mutiny by facing the men myself. That I'm determined. You will be in the air then, but you must think of me, facing my very
last challenge as a commissioned officer. I shall shoot to kill if they charge at me, and you will read the incident in
The Times.
'

‘Actually, I think it was hangovers as much as mutiny, sir.'

‘Nonsense, nonsense – mutiny is mutiny, and I shall stand firm.'

‘I'll be thinking of you, sir. Good luck, sir.'

‘Thank you, Sergeant Stubbs.' His moustache vibrated.

We saluted each other. The Dutch major with the crew-cut applauded.

After all this, it was inevitable that we moved
en masse
to the Dutch major's bungalow in the
RAPWI
area. There was a sense of surprise when we emerged from the undertaker's parlour into the street, to find that the burnt-out lorry was still there and the trees by the cemetery still smouldering. I was bundled into a civilian car, where I immediately started to weep gin-flavoured tears on some woman's shoulder.

At the major's place music flowed as well as drink. The major began to laugh a great deal. Several attractive pushers showed up, wearing low-cut dresses. A party got under way. Everyone became light-hearted, even the older people and Jan's aged auntie. A gramophone was brought in. A big gleaming blonde took charge of it and played ‘Dark Town Strutters Ball' over and over.

Everyone was dancing. Jhamboo grabbed a small blonde; I grabbed the big gleaming one. ‘Ya gotta be there when the band starts playing …', she sang, warmly, moistly, in my ear.

After a little while, I went into another room and wept again. My Indian watch had stopped during the shooting. I wound both watches and wept for their inefficiency, which embodied nameless things. The crew-cut major tiptoed in with a woman, patted my shoulder and said, ‘We all owe our lives to you.'

Bullshit. I seized his hand and said, ‘I wish I had your superb courage. Proud to know you.'

Then we both wept. Or maybe that did not happen at all. I was not so much drunk as intoxicated. There's such a difference between friendly people and people who are friends.

Some while later, a surge of new guests entered the bungalow. Cries and uproar preceded them. It was sunset. Time had passed. Laughs, groans, cheers, shrieks, wild shouting in a foreign tongue, greeted the newcomers. A woman left me, rushing towards the door and throwing herself into the arms of a blond male replica of herself. The commotion was a mystery to me. Alienation closed in. I did not know how to get away.

The major jumped on an armchair and called for silence. He made an announcement, greeted with mad catcalls and jeers and a sort of generalised frenzy. I realised that the Dutch were stark flaming mad. Two little ugly orderlies rushed in with boxes full of lager bottles, and the party started up again.

‘The wrong party,' I shouted at one of the orderlies, grabbing up a bottle of lager. ‘I'm at the wrong party.' I determined to escape. I lurched into the other room and there – that's silly, I thought – there before me were Maurice Boyer and his light o' love.

They were surrounded by a crowd of people, predominantly female, all in a high old state of animation. Something remarkable was happening on or to Raddle's face. The head was nodding in a manner suggestive of laughter; the mouth was hanging open; tears were running from her eyes, slime from her nose. At the same time her whole considerable body was heaving back and forth with such a violent motion that saliva, tears, and slime were scattered about the crowd. Happily, the crowd was engaged in similar activity, although to a less marked degree. Recalling Raddle's ability to vomit, I marvelled at this new feat of expression before realising that I was watching someone simultaneously laughing and crying at the top of her bent.

Boyer was standing with his back to Raddle, talking emotionally to two men, gesticulating in a manner foreign to him. When she caught sight of me, she burst past the Dutch women and threw herself into my arms, in a scatter of various moistures.

‘Oh, Stewbs, Stewbs, I never think I see your drunken face more!'

She gave me a big perspiring kiss like a smack in the face with a hot slug.

I clutched a lot of her. ‘Oh, you are a darling. I thought you'd gone for good.'

‘Plaything of fate …' She was incoherent. I mopped her face. A nice woman, for all her faults.

We started dancing round. Boyer arrived. He had stopped laughing.

I had started laughing. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, sir?'

‘It's the blewdy
Van Heutsz
, Stewbs,' began Raddle, when Boyer produced a large handkerchief and also mopped her face. He worked with broad punitive strokes.

‘What are you doing here, Stubbs? This is an officers' party.'

‘I was invited along.'

‘Well, let's not hear any more about your personal troubles, right? Everyone here has got blithering personal troubles. You don't see any other non-commissioned officers, do you?'

‘Don't be like that, Maurice,' said Raddle, starting to go into her laughing/crying routine again. ‘It's not his fault the blewdy
Van Heutsz
ran ashore on the sandbag.'

‘Have a drink, sir,' I said, proffering a bottle.

‘Not Black Tartan Wombat, is it?' A look of paranoia crossed his face.

‘It's lager, sir. Heineken.'

‘Stomach hasn't recovered from that other filthy muck yet.'

He took my bottle and started to swig. Between swigs and interruptions, he adopted a mellower tone, now that I had
put Raddle down, and explained what had happened.

‘As the old girl's just intimated, the blithering boat ran against a sandbank or a sunken wreck – nobody knows which exactly – in Belawan harbour, about two miles offshore. You know how shallow it is there, or maybe you don't.'

‘I do.' He had finished off my lager.

‘Destiny plays a charade with us, Stewbs. Fate amewses himself with abrupt twists of the tale.'

‘There it's stuck until they can get a tug from Singapore to tow it off. Everyone's had to return to Medan, second day on the trot. So Raddle and I have been granted a few extra days' bliss together.'

‘It was meant to be, Maurice. My husband will be so fewrious, but such coincidences are in our stars; we are their pewpets.'

They fell on each other, as different couples were doing all around.

Belawan harbour was extremely shallow and the channel had not been dredged since before the war. Boats with any draught worth speaking of had to stand off two miles or more out to sea. Their goods and passengers were ferried ashore in
LCTS
. Geography had assisted Raddle's destiny.

I needed a pee. On the way out, I grabbed more alcohol. Boyer and his light o' love scarcely noticed me go. They were moving, I observed, into the first phases of a mating process which was going to take all night. It reminded me that I had similar commitments ahead, in particular an obligation to make things up with Margey and say good-bye honourably. I also had to deliver some cigarettes.

The crew-cut major, red in the face to the roots of his hair, swept me up with a crowd of jostling girls. They had brought their luggage back from Belawan and it stood about their feet, making progress across the room difficult. More drinks went down, among continuous exclamations of joy and chagrin at the reunion.

Finally, I blundered towards the door, only to be caught by Boyer.

‘Didn't mean to be curt with you, Stubbs. Just keep your place. I can't bear to see anyone with their paws on my charming lady. Look here, I don't want to let you down about this Chinese bit of yours. You didn't show up at the Company office, or I'd have spoken to you then. It's difficult to talk with all this luggage under foot.'

‘Sir.'

‘If you're crazy about her, well, we all have our impulses. I've told you my opinion of Chinese girls, bless their little slant-eyed holes, but that's only my opinion. Frankly, the way I look at it is, miscegenation is just an extreme form of heterosexuality. Quite a bit of the attraction of Raddle, for instance – it's not
Raddle
, by the way, it's
Raddl
– lies in her foreign –'

‘God, I must have a pee, sir, sorry.' Preferably within the next two point five seconds. Stumbling over suitcases, I gave Boyer a despairing look and made for the night. The darkness was intersected by lights, punctuated by music, and shredded by shouts and laughter. The area was impregnated by inevitable barbecues. I rushed behind the bungalow. Lobbing my tool out, I pissed with some force and splendour into the nearest bush, no doubt striking a profound blow at its livelihood.

For reasons I could not fathom, I felt immensely weary, bitter, and drunk. Sinking down on the nearest wooden verandah step, I rested my face in my hands. The coriolis effect became rather self-evident. I slumped sideways against a railing.

Disaster came back to my mind, and the thought of Sontrop's body pitching head first into the earth in its box. I attempted to recall the sympathetic sights of Katie Chae with her legs open, or Margey's laugh; all that returned was the face of the wounded Ambonese soldier, smiling, smiling, as his sergeant prodded his injuries. Brave bastards, those Ambonese. You might well ask, why did they side with the Netherlanders against the Indonesians? But the army was their business; they fought for whoever paid them. In those days, Amboina was a long way from Sumatra.

As I write these paragraphs, the news headlines feature a sensational military operation in Holland, outside Bolingen, not far from where Addy now lives. Sinister people the media refer to as ‘South Moluccan terrorists' seized a train full of hostages, demanding that the Dutch government put pressure on Indonesia to let them return to their native land. Negotiations came to nothing. After twenty days of deadlock, the Dutch sent in six Starfighters to blanket the area with smoke bombs. Then the marines went in. Two of the hostages and six of the so-called terrorists were shot. Now the area is being cleaned up as if nothing had happened. The bullet-ridden train was towed away into a siding.

And who were these ‘South Moluccan terrorists'? The title shows how history and the understanding of it can be destroyed in a phrase. The ‘South Moluccans' are our old pals the Ambonese. The chaps on the train were probably sons of the boyos who used to sit on the pavements of Bootha Street, cleaning their guns and singing
‘Terang Boelan' ad nauseam.

In the 45–6 dust up, the Ambonese chose the wrong side. How were they to understand at that time that global changes were under way? Medan was almost as foreign to them as to me – Amboina is as far from Medan as London is from Cairo. They were soldiering on, at a period when half the world was soldiering far from home. But try telling that to the
TRI
. When Soekarno finally won control of Indonesia, thousands of Ambonese had no option but to leave with their families. Where were they to go but to the distant land of their masters; in the cool reaches of North Europe, poor sods? Miscegenation in World War
II
was global.