World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (2 page)

Chapter Two

I
t was because of George Wheeler that I started to draw.

Wheeler, the manager of the Bukit Merah Rubber Estate in Malaya, lived alone in a huge gloomy bungalow submerged in an ocean of rubber trees. He was an unhappy and frustrated man. And the day I arrived out from England to start work as an assistant he addressed me as follows:

“You'll find me a pretty easy-going boss on the whole—but there's one thing I will not tolerate on this estate. And that's miscegenation.”

I said uncomfortably, “I'm not quite sure what that means.”

“Messing about with native women.”

I glanced round the somber cage of mosquito wire that was his living room. The shelves were cluttered with books on mountaineering, the walls covered with pictures of mountaineering feats torn from magazines. Clearly Wheeler found an outlet for his emotions in dreaming of the conquest of glittering peaks. But how, I wondered, did others fare under his prohibition?

I soon found out: it had affected his assistants in various ways. It had caused my predecessor, a Pole, to propose through the post to a pen-friend in Glasgow whom he had never met; the girl had come out, they had been married, and now they were over at Kuantan, still behaving like lovebirds and awaiting their third child. Less happy, however, had been the effect on Ted Willis, one of my fellow assistants: already too introverted, he had turned even more in upon himself, becoming at the age of twenty-four a virtual recluse, and probably an emotional cripple for life. As for dear old Tubby Penfold, my other colleague, it had simply caused him to increase his repertoire of smutty stories and to embroider them with more detail; though occasionally he would relieve himself in some more extravagant fashion, as when once, suddenly bursting in upon me with broad and triumphant grins, he described an encounter with a Tamil woman whom he had found hanging round the smoking shed: “Black as your hat, mind you, and with those bloody great dingle-dangle things in her nose—but fairly gasping for it . . . My God, nothing like a good old knee-trembler to set you up!” I knew it was fantasy but pretended to believe him, and my belief made him almost as happy as if it had been true.

The first time I really felt the effect of the prohibition on myself was about a month after my arrival, when I fell in love with a Malay girl.

She was not employed on the estate, but would walk past my bungalow several times a day, and always at mealtimes when I was on the verandah. Was this only coincidence? I suspected otherwise, because of her wicked laughing eyes and the provocative swing of her hips when she knew I watched her. Her skin was like warm honey. I became obsessed by her, and all day long out on the estate I would be yearning for the next glimpse of her, and making plans for possessing her without the knowledge of Wheeler. A dozen times I nearly ran out to her; then fear of losing my job would prevail. Eventually she stopped coming. I had not even spoken to her, yet despair went to the depths of my soul.

After that the days seemed to drag, the evenings to be interminable with nothing to fill them but Tubby Penfold's smut. Oh, that cavernous emptiness after the early tropical sundown! I began to drink more than was good for me, to bridge the hours with stupor. I saw the red light. “At this rate,” I thought one evening, “I shall go to pieces within a year. I must do something—find a hobby.” And I took an old exercise book and a ball-point pen, and began to draw.

I had never drawn or painted before in my life, except at school, and then only under compulsion in weekly art classes, and without distinction. I had regarded the “arty boys” as a race apart, peculiar and to be deplored. In the holidays, as a cultural duty, I had visited the main London galleries and been bored: my lingering memories were not of the pictures but of the spectators, who had interested me much more. And only in the Royal Academy had there stirred in me a single critical thought: why on earth, I had wondered, were all the portraits so stodgy? Why were all the subjects so tidied up, so woodenly posed? Why were they never caught in a moment of life? There was more character, more expression, more meaning, in one uncertainly peering spectator's face than in any dozen of the faces in frames.

I had left school during the war and gone straight into the army, and within a year found myself in India. When the war ended I had been upcountry in Burma; and one day I had stood watching a Burmese woman washing clothes in the Irrawaddy, squatting by the water with her bright red
longyi
taut over her thighs. A Dakota aircraft had come down river, splitting the sky with its din. The woman had paid no attention until it was right overhead; then, still pummeling at the washing, she had lifted her face and given it a brief, indifferent, almost contemptuous glance—the glance of a Burmese villager who for four years had watched foreign armies fighting their seesaw battle, passing back and forth with their massive noisy machines for destruction, inflicting on each other the most hideous mass slaughter—and who was still washing clothes in the Irrawaddy as she had been washing them since childhood, no better and no worse off than she had been before. And then suddenly I had found myself filled with elation; for that glance, that tilt of the head as the hands went on pounding, had seemed to me extraordinarily beautiful in their depth of meaning, their expression of truth. If only I could have captured and preserved that moment! How much it would have told about Burma, about war, about people, about life! But already the noise of the Dakota was fading; the woman's eyes had returned to her washing; the moment had gone.

Soon afterwards I had bought a camera from a fellow officer in the mess; for there had been other such moments, such scenes, and it had seemed to me that in these, rather than in the Shwe Dagon Pagoda or the crumbling monuments of Pagan, had lain the real beauty of Burma and the real meaning of the country's life, and I had been determined to capture them. I had taken photographs by the score. But among all these photographs not more than a dozen had caught the look, the gesture, the moment at which I had aimed; and these, indeed, had been the most disappointing of all, for nothing that I had expected was to be found in them. They had turned out empty, flat, devoid of meaning. But why, why? Since they were true records of moments that had moved me, why weren't they moving in themselves?

And then I had begun to understand. A moment could never be complete in itself, since it belonged to a context of movement and mood, and only in this context had meaning; and moreover part of this context was the observer himself, interpreting the moment in the light of his own mind—his own personality and knowledge. Thus when I had seen the Burmese woman by the Irrawaddy it was not her actual expression that had moved me, but what this had suggested to me when filtered through my own vision: when fused with my own experience, my own hatred of destruction and war. And on another person standing at my side, the moment would have made a different impression. Indeed on a dozen people, it would have made a dozen different impressions.

And so it was that very belatedly—for no doubt most people had taken it for granted since childhood—I discovered the first, and possibly the only, truth about art: that its function was not to say, “This is how X looked at a given moment,” but, “This is how X looked to me.”

Soon my demobilization papers came through and I returned to England. I had loved the East, and wandering round London again, chilly in my new suit, I felt miserable and lost. My parents were dead; I had no training for a career; no feeling of roots, of belonging. Then my uncle took me into his estate agency in Sloane Street, promising me eventual partnership if I proved myself worthy. I gritted my teeth, went to night school, slogged at homework, and in the office began to use, with increasing familiarity, words like leasehold, tithe, non-basement, low out-goings, parquet flooring, maisonette. “I hate this life, but I've got to show I can do it,” I thought. “I've got to pass my exams.” But I had no sooner done so than I threw it all up to go planting in Malaya; and though my kindly, disappointed uncle said, “I'm afraid you may regret it,” I knew when I caught my first nostalgic whiff of the East that he had been wrong. I had been three parts dead in London, catching buses in Sloane Square; now suddenly I had become wholly alive again, all my senses alert. And once more I began to feel elated by those fleeting moments of beauty: by those gestures, those expressions, those little scenes of native life. If only, I thought, I had been an artist! . . . And thus it was that in my third month at Bukit Merah, after the Malay girl had ceased her tantalizing walks, I took the exercise book and the ball-point pen and started to draw.

And almost at once, though I had no illusion about the crudity of my first scribblings, I felt myself to have a real facility. It was a strange, an almost uncanny sensation. It was as if I had sat down at a typewriter for the first time and found my fingers familiar with the keys—like the feeling of “I have been here before.” And at the same time it was tremendously exciting. I had always thought, “I'm not a bad all-rounder, but there's nothing at which I'm
really
good,” and I had envied those with a bent, a talent, some metier at which they could excel. And now at last I had found a métier of my own. And it was as if, by accident, I had pulled open a drawer that I had always thought to be empty, and found it to contain a treasure that could alter the course of my whole life.

Soon drawing had become a total preoccupation: I thought of nothing else day or night. I carried a sketchbook in my pocket while out on the estate, and all the time I would be watching for moments to sneak away and record impressions, and counting the hours until the lunch break or until the evening when I could indulge my passion freely. Every moment of spare time had become infinitely precious. I was hungry for knowledge, for instruction. I racked my brains for any morsel of advice that I might have retained accidentally from those wasted art classes at school. I sent to Singapore and London for art books of every description. I devoured them avidly; found myself moved, enchanted, thrilled, by the reproductions of pictures whose originals, twelve years ago in the London galleries, had left me cold. Even newspaper cartoons, pictorial letterheads, held new interest for me, as I studied them to see how their effect had been achieved. And I no longer thought about the Malay girl who had walked past my bungalow. My frustrated emotions had been canalized. I was pouring into my sketchbook all the energy that, but for George Wheeler's prohibition, I would have spent in making love.

I discarded styles unsuited to me, and by the end of a year was working comfortably in a style of my own. I had also started drawing in color, first using children's crayons from the local Chinese store, then pastels sent from England. And now I began a new adventure into the world of oils.

Wheeler, despite the number of times he had caught me sketching in working hours, was well-disposed toward my hobby, which he thought clean-minded; indeed I was his favorite assistant, for he had little use for Tubby Penfold, whose mind so uncleanly dwelt on girls. He even asked me to paint a picture for him. It was Coronation year, and Everest had just been climbed: he wanted me to reconstruct on canvas the moment of conquest at the summit, and had collected magazine photographs of Hillary and Tensing for me to use as models. I had neither the taste nor the capability for such an assignment, but expediently promised to do my best; and I duly produced a work of prodigious falsity, that nevertheless delighted him. And he hung it on his bedroom wall, so that he could relive the Himalayan epic in bed.

A week later, still purring over my Everest effort, he showed me an item in a London newspaper: a gossip columnist's interview with a woman painter whose first exhibition had just opened at a private gallery, Ullman's, in the West End. And all Mayfair was gasping with astonishment, for the woman, who was in her mid-thirties, had only taken up painting the previous year.

“And you've been at it longer than that now,” Wheeler said. “Why don't you send them some of your efforts?”

“I'm not good enough yet,” I said; though a more accurate rendering of my thoughts might have been, “I think I'm pretty good myself, but I'm not sure that others will think so, and I'm scared stiff of putting myself to the test.”

“Well, have a shot—you've nothing to lose.”

I took no more persuading, and promptly dispatched a quantity of pastel drawings and two oils at enormous expense by air. But they were not even acknowledged. It was the last I saw or heard of them for eight months.

And I did after all have something to lose—my self-confidence. The blood rushed to my cheeks when I thought of my presumption in sending my pictures to London—how well I could imagine the derision with which they had been received! I dared not even write to ask for their return. My belief in myself was shaken. And it was therefore no mere chance—since to restore self-esteem a man will often turn to a woman—that during this period I became engaged to Stella.

Stella Plowden was twenty-four and moderately pretty, which by upcountry Malayan standards meant ravingly beautiful; and when she came out with her mother to stay on the next estate to Bukit Merah the bachelors converged on her—from a radius of a hundred miles. I joined in the stampede, with the advantage not only of proximity but also of the bandits—for after one suitor, incautiously motoring Stella-wards overnight, had been ambushed and shot dead, the ardor of other far-flung competitors had noticeably cooled. I proposed to her on Christmas Day; on Boxing Day was accepted; and by early New Year had already become aware of gnawing doubts. However, it was not until April that I had the courage to break it off.

The chief cause of friction between us was my painting. It hurt Stella that I should continue to sketch and paint Malays more than herself. She could not understand. Now that I had a willing model, impeccably white-skinned and not unattractive, why should I go on wasting my talents on natives? She did not admit to this grievance for a time, but I could not help being aware of it, for whenever I showed her my work she would become moody and make edged remarks, and start picking on my faults—on every fault except the one which was actually upsetting her. Eventually, however, she came out with it: it was not, she explained, that she wanted to be painted—indeed she could think of nothing more utterly boring—but that my apparent lack of interest in her was so humiliating. Only this morning her mother had asked her if I was painting her portrait, and she had been obliged to reply, “No, he's painting some Malay girl.” She could have died of shame.