Key to the Door

CHAPTER 23

At nine o’clock one June morning an open fifteen-hundredweight turned from the camp gates and set the heavy tread of its tyres north along the coast road. The sweat on Brian’s face was soon fanned dry by its speed and, one of six, he leaned against the side and took off his bush hat, felt his short fair hair jerking in the wind. He’d been up since five, checking maps, building up the contents of his pack, and stowing the compass where it wasn’t likely to smash or get wet. Shaded under the palms, the long cookhouse went back to sleep after they had eaten and clobbered out.

He’d thought this day would never come, but now that the powerful rasping lorry engine roared them along towards Gunong Barat he was relaxed, hardly excited at all. Instead, strangely enough, when blue and cloud-reflecting paddy fields fanned out richly eastwards, thoughts and memories of Nottingham pushed into his mind and this dwelling on the past damped the intoxication he’d always expected to feel. He was puzzled, but grunted and lit a fag, bending under the backboard to escape the wind. Pauline came to mind: tall and abstracted as she walked along the privet-hedged pavement of the wide street, her pale face given character by a slight thinness after the baby had been born. Everything that happened to Brian since leaving school, the long four years of work and courting, had led to him marrying Pauline and thinking now: I’m spliced, though it’s never felt like it should, for even when I slept with her on my odd days of leave it only seemed like getting in a bit of rooky I wasn’t entitled to. Even the kid she had ain’t made much of a picture to my mind, so why did I marry her? I needn’t have done, in one way, and I haven’t spent enough married life with her yet to know whether or not I feel good at getting married when I did. Which I suppose is how you’re bound to feel when you come to think about it.

The sun’s heat, seeming to pierce his skull in spite of the wind, slowly banished the intruding vision, and he was glad to give his eyes up to magic-lantern pictures of Malaya spread all around in colour. They reached the airstrip, and when a plane touched down, the lorry belted forward and slung Baker on to the load of packs. “You louse-bound bastard,” he screamed. “I suppose he thinks we’re just the normal air-force cattle. Why the bloody hell did he have to wake us this morning? I was having marvellous dreams, riding down through Kent with a smashing girl on the pillion. There’s just no civilization left.”

“Stop your effing griping,” Kirkby growled. “You get on my wick. Why did you bleddy-well come if you didn’t want to?”

“There are stranger things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Kirkby.” Baker wasn’t capable of sneering, but the angle at which he held his head (really a physical defect due to bad eyesight) and the tone of superiority in his voice often angered those who didn’t know him, or were unable to match this feeling. “Listen,” Kirkby called back, “you’ll get this bloody bayonet up your bleeding philosophy if you don’t sodding-well belt up.”

“You’re lucky to be here,” Brian said, “after we all lied for you the other day.” Baker, with a sane and self-righteous expression, had been marched into the orderly room on a charge of insubordination against the sergeant who’d said they weren’t to take suitcases back on the boat. Half the signals billet filed in behind to perjure themselves and testify that the sergeant had struck Baker first. So he had got off.

The silver, geometrically spaced trees of a rubber estate grew miles back from the roadside, and bursting into open land once more, the stink of putrescent mud assailed them from the banks of a wide, shallow, hardly moving river. The lorry wheels treddled loose planks of a pontoon bridge, and Jack the Welshman hurrah-ed ironically on reaching tarmac. Brown pal-thatched huts of a kampong stood away from the roadside, every turn of which brought them nearer to Gunong Barat, so that by mid-morning its dark green humps climbed up and back to the sharp summit fixed against a mass of white-bellied cloud. “It looks beautiful, anyway,” Brian called to Knotman. “I’d never a seen this if I adn’t left Nottingham.”

“It’s all relative, though,” Knotman said. “When I was stationed near London I used to like going round the East End — White-chapel and Bethnal Green — back along Cable Street. I used to find that inspiring in a strange way. Ever been to Petticoat Lane market? That’s beautiful as well. You ought to live in London when you get back. Get a job there.”

“I’d like to. I never wanted to stick in one place. I expect there’s lots of small engineering firms in London as ’ud set me on.”

“Sure. You’re young. Your wife wouldn’t mind a change, would she?”

“Not if I want it,” Brian said. The broad main street of Balik Kubong was drawn by them like a sleeve, and they were back on the open road. Forking left at Penunjok, the lorry nearly scooped off with a petrol pump. “That bastard wants certifyin’,” Kirkby said. Rubber estates grew thicker around, and the lorry switched north along an unpaved road with a small river to the left — recognized from the map as the Sungei Pawan. The road ended sharply at the jungle’s edge, as if the surveyors had downed tools and refused to go farther at the sudden dispiriting thickness of the forest. Brian was so glad to leave the lorry he almost fell off: “He didn’t kill us, anyway.”

The taciturn driver spun his lorry around and shot it between the trees, making for the more manoeuvrable spaces of the main road before louder curses got through to him. Brian heaved his pack up, shook it squarely against his shoulders. They were dressed in khaki shirts, slacks tucked in at the ankles to wide-topped mosquito boots, and bush hats. Each shouldered pack was squared by blanket and cape, and Christmas-treed around by a full waterbottle, haversack, kukri, and rifle. Brian looked at the jungle, stood in silence a minute or two as if wondering what he was doing there, and why he wanted to enter that towering wall of trees from which only the sound of rushing water emerged in an unfair tit for tat. So that’s the jungle: he grinned. Where’s all them tropical flowers and Technicolor parrots flitting from tree to tree? What about Tarzan and Martin Rattler, Allan Quatermain and Jungle Jim? Not that I ever believed in all that anyway, at least not after I left school. It was dark green and dull, full of gloom and the uninviting pillars of stark trees.

They advanced in single file up the bed of the stream. Progress was slow, because the six-stone loads made them almost top-heavy. Slime-covered rocks underwater often upset their balance, and each on the first days at some time capsized into ice-cold water. Subsidiary hills shouldered to two thousand feet on either side, and the rolling jungle on their slopes looked impossible to penetrate. “I’d rather be in Kew Gardens,” Baker said and, as if to prove it, slipped and went down into the water like a raft that held up his pack, rifle, and hat. Brian levered him out.

Odgeson was supposed to be in charge of the party, a tall thin fair-haired dental surgeon not long qualified and looking little older than the other twenty-year-olds. At the first pause for breath Knotman said, his voice firm yet kept in a narrow edge of respect and gentleness: “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll be in charge from now on. I’ve done this sort of jungle-crawling before. It’ll be easier that way.”

Odgeson agreed: “I was going to suggest it anyway”—pulled the two rings of rank from his shoulder straps and fastened them under the band of his cigarette case. They went on, each taking turns to be in front and find safe footsteps through the water. Ground rose slowly, and the tree gap stayed wide enough to let in sunlight, so that while they were often ice-cold to the waist, their shirts fastened heavily against them with sweat.

Brian was happy with the exertion, careful to place one foot firmly down before swinging to the other. The pack chafed at his back because all food was in tins, and sharp rims came keen against his bones. Talk flew about, laughter ripping along the canyon of the stream, even Baker finding his feet and spirit after a while. It was a picnic, a climb in the woods for the first hours, and when the stream ballooned into a large clear pool of water they stripped to their tanned skins and waded in.

It was necessary to climb between the trees proper, to outflank a ravine whose sides were sheer for hundreds of feet, a sickle-shaped cleft as narrow as a knife-wound in the mountain slope. Knotman led the way, slung his rifle and drew a razor-edged kukri from its case, parting the bushes for a drag upwards. “Picnic over,” Jack the Welshman said, second in the file. They struggled through damp soil and undergrowth, lifting into shadows and semi-darkness. Above and all round them on the steep slope grew trees and tangles of bushes. Neither Brian nor anyone but Knotman had ever seen the like, and they wondered how they’d get through it. Creepers and climbing plants hung with mosses, and ferns were bound together with long trailers, crossed like webs of rope that some impatient giant had tried making but given up as a bad job. Tall forest trees loomed roundabout, and the thick massive foliage of their tops made a canopy that seemed to have kept the sky back for thousands of years.

“Why don’t somebody put the light on?” Kirkby shouted. It rained, a steady unobtrusive downbeat of water that ate into all they carried. A path was cut slowly through. Loaded like pack mules, they found the climb exhausting, and after a few hundred feet, each fell into the undergrowth for a rest. Brian pulled clods of red soil from his soaking boots.

“Come on,” Knotman said. “It’ll be dark soon.” With laughter they were on their way, trying to follow the contour and keep the stream parallel, but in reality travelling eyeless since there was no view and even the compass gave no useful aid. Brian took the lead, wielding his kukri at the creepers, one almost strangling him before he saw it. His arms became leaden and unmanageable, as if held into his body by bandaged wounds. “Have a turn now,” he said to Kirkby. Baker cursed blind in disentangling himself from creepers. They seemed to have it in for him, Brian suggested, and caught at his pack, rifle, arms, and legs. He slipped and began rolling, but latched on to a friendlier vine before he went too far down the hillside. Odgeson and Brian pulled him upright — “like getting a knight in armour on to his horse,” Brian said. “We need a block-and-tackle for this bleeding job.”

Another hard stretch and they sat down again. It still rained. Brian levered a tin of cigarettes from his pocket, handed them around. Wet soil soaked through to his skin, and a stream of water, collected by some hollow and hoarding leaf in the treetop world above, slid down on to the brim of his hat. What a place! As a child (and more recently) he’d imagined the adventure of living beyond all forms of shelter, himself pitted abroad against the vagaries of God’s earth, and the abiding sensation had been one of comfort and self-possession, of glorying quietly in his solitude. His long nights alone in the DF hut had given him a forerunning taste of the hermit life, but now that he was wet and chafed under the jungle trees and a long way from shelter or bed, the battle against nature seemed more real. At the same time and in spite of all discomfort, such exposure lit the recesses of his hermit soul with a light that made him feel more equal to himself than he had been before: fag-smoke warmed his lungs, and patterns blown from his lips stayed firm a few seconds in the heavy vaporous air. He sat apart. Hardly anyone spoke, and then in low voices as if trapped in some damp, dusky, and endless cathedral. Brian felt dazed, the first spells of exhaustion having worked their way, after so many months of soft life in camp, to the core of his understanding, so that he found the difference between today and yesterday hard to credit.

They descended towards the stream and at half-past five laid camp on a flat bed of rock where the river dropped into a waterfall as if pouring itself through a funnel, the banks being only a few yards apart. Brian’s back ached, half-broken and on fire where the rim of the big pack had rubbed all day into him, and stripping off his shirt, he uncovered a wide red sore. Two tins of soaked fags were slung into the water, went bobbing their way towards the long drop of the waterfall. “That’ll be less to carry,” he said, aware again of his back, as if a bite had been taken out of it.

“So will that,” Knotman said, putting his cigarette to a bloated leech fixed on a good feed at Baker’s shoulder. Shirts and trousers hung over bushes, and more leeches were found: sometimes they didn’t drop, but burst, leaving a copious fall of blood on arm or leg. Knotman said they should haul in a stock of wood for the night fire, and a blaze was going by darkfall. “It’ll be a bloody long time before we reach the top at this rate,” Baker said. He stood by the stream, gazing into thick shadowy jungle on the other side. “What did you expect?” Knotman asked. “A piece of cake?”

“No,” he shot back; “a cable railway.”

“You’re not in Switzerland,” Odgeson laughed.

“I can’t see us reaching the top tomorrow, either,” Knotman said. “At this rate it’ll take three or four days.” Jack had finished eating, was polishing his twelve bore, pulling it through and clearing soil from the barrel. “I could dig a coal mine under this quicker than we’re climbing it.”

“What they ought to do,” Brian said, “is burn all this down with flame-throwers and grow lettuces. Or build roads so’s cars could run over it at sixty miles an hour.” Supper finished, they hung mosquito-nets from overhanging branches and made beds beneath — two beds sleeping two in each. Brian didn’t see any reason for two being on guard, but Knotman thought it wise, so nobody argued. “Two in a bed,” Baker said. “It’s a pansies’ paradise.”

“At least you’ll get summat out o’ this trip then!”

“Balls, Seaton,” he shouted back.

Brian was on guard with Knotman at midnight, sitting on a rock a few yards apart and stilled by a heaviness of unsatisfied sleep. Brian kept his rifle upright and head leaning out for it as he slowly lost consciousness. The crack of a twig came from the opposite bank — so close and overhanging in the darkness he felt he could stretch out his arm and touch it — once he woke up. Knotman had already heard the shrubbery rustling, seen a large cat poised in the low flames of the fire. They aimed at the same time. Brian joyfully let go five shots, glad to have noise in the oppressive darkness filled only by the stream rushing into the suicide dive of the nearby falls. The shots echoed into the surrounding mountain slopes like God’s whips trying to drive away darkness, and presumably the animal they saw slipped unnoticed away. The others didn’t stir, and Brian in the silence paraphrased some lines he remembered from Dante’s Inferno, a book he’d collared from the camp library months ago, and had read in fits and starts at the DF hut:

“In the midway of this our mortal life,

I found me in a gloomy wood astray,

Gone from the path direct. And e’en to tell

It were no easy task, how savage wild

That forest, how robust and rough its growth … scarce the ascent

Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light,

And covered with a speckled skin appeared …”

You’d think he’d written it on Gunong Barat, he thought, glad when Kirkby crawled from under the net and told him to get some kip.

After breakfast he sighted bearings on visible hill-points and plotted them. “Hey,” he called from a ledge of higher rock. “You know how far we’ve come so far?” Nobody guessed. “One thousand three hundred paltry yards,” he yelled. “We’re a thousand feet above where we set off yesterday.”

“Three more days. It looks as if you’re going to be right,” Odgeson said to Knotman, who merely nodded and slung on his pack, ready to lead upstream.

A waterfall — two ashen lines on a green limestone cliff — meant another climb up through the jungle to get round it. Some falls twisted like threads of snow down easy slopes and were overcome on all fours, but mostly the sheer cliffs were dangerous to scale with such anchoring packs. At tunes the sores on Brian’s back forced their pain into the open, making him lag behind until he could bear weight resting on them again. By the end of the day, he had worn down their stings, knew it was only a matter of time before the skin hardened and he didn’t notice it any more — like the first time he’d gone with soft hands into the factory. Sweat dripped from his face as he toiled in the rear-guard, his whole body — legs and armpits, belly and groin and shoulder blades — caked in salt.

“What’s the matter?” Knotman asked, seeing him shift his pack around. “I’ve got the galloping singapores,” Brian said. “The bleeders itch and chafe.”

“I’ve got ’em as well, only mine are the galloping rangoons.” They sat around and smoked, everyone dwelling on his sores. Jack claimed the galloping hong-kongs, and Odgeson laughed at the idea of being stricken with the galloping penangs. “I’ve just got bleeding scabs on my bad back,” Kirkby raged, “and I wish they’d gallop away.” Hard biscuits and chocolate were handed around, tin mugs dipped at their feet for water.

They sat among boulders in a scattered group, and a small green-fringed bird perched on a bough they all could see. Probably no human being had been there for years, since it wasn’t on the way anywhere and nothing grew there that men wanted. Even elephants had disappeared from that particular dent of the mountains. Jack quietly raised his.303, aimed, and shot the air wide open. The bird fell on a rock, red mixed with green. “With my crossbow I shot the albatross,” Brian laughed.

“Fortunately for us,” Baker said, “it was only some jungle sparrow, otherwise Brian’s right: we’d really be in the shit.” Knotman gazed at the bird, stroking the stubble across his chin. “You’d better go easy on the ammo”—meaning: “You cruel bastard: you didn’t need to shoot it.”

“Every bullet we fire is less to carry,” Jack said, back on his feet. “This pack’s giving me hell.”

“Why did we bring rifles anyway?” Brian thought aloud. “They weigh an effing ton.”

Odgeson laughed: “Instinct. Nobody questioned it, did they?”

“Nobody questions bogger all. I wouldn’t take a rifle in Sherwood Forest, and this place ain’t more dangerous.”

“What about that tiger you saw last night, then?” Jack asked.

“That worn’t no tiger,” Kirkby jeered. “More like a shadder: yo’ lot’s a bag o’ nerves.”

“It was something big,” Knotman said. “I saw it, and so did Brian.” Standing to the renewed weight of his pack before starting, Brian wondered whether he had. Noise of twigs and a shadow blacker than those around, then a cascade of bullets chasing it: the obtruding terrors of imagination that might or might not have added up to a tiger. Maybe I was seeing things, though it’s hard to believe Knotman was. As long as I didn’t wing it, because there was no need.

He sat by one of the two heaped fires during the night, and the few yards of swirling stream held forth a pair of luminous pinheads growing slowly to green eyes, then diminishing again. Rushing water had filled his ears for days, was so familiar (like the factory at the yard-end in Radford) that the noise was no longer noticed. Only at certain times — like now when his mind turned fully to wondering what the phosphorescent lights across the stream belonged to — did the sound rush back. From humps of net-protected blanket someone grunted in his sleep: lucky sod — I expect he’s a long way out of this, on the back row at the pictures with his juicy young girl. I wish I was dead to the wide and dreaming away. The eyes still shone. Not another tiger, he hoped, and was about to laugh out like a donkey, but instead raised his rifle to fire before he got too terrified to do so. The eyes drifted apart and vanished, and he stared out each one until he had to close and refocus his own eyes. If the others knew I’d been frightened at a couple of fireflies, he laughed. The trouble is I’m too ready to lift this bleeding rifle when it’s not needed, almost as bad as Jack. A bullet never did anybody any good. I’ll jump at my own shadow next.

“What’s going on?” Baker demanded from the other fire.

“Nothing.” He laid more wood on the embers, and was startled by a dancing scuffle from Baker, whose shotgun exploded with a dull roar, the wake of its echo filled with curses. “What’s up?” Brian cried.

“A snake. It just uncoiled near my boot.”

“You want your brains testing.”

“I’m not the only one,” Baker said.

Even though each morning the amount of stuff to be packed diminished because of food eaten, it was hard to fit everything in. Blankets, capes, mosquito-nets, food, and ammunition lay scattered around waiting to find a place in the packs. It looked as if someone had tipped a dustbin over.

They set off for the third day. No greater distance was spanned, but it was accomplished with less grumbling and exertion. At one place they saw the peak, a scarf of white cloud across its throat, two thousand feet above. “Tomorrow night,” Knotman said, “and we’ll be up there looking down on where we are now.” Everyone derided this, argued that by the look of it they’d be on top tonight, or early in the morning. Knotman hitched up his pack and went on, whistling to himself a good fifty yards in front.

“But when a mountain’s foot I reached where closed

The valley that had pierced my heart with dread,

I looked aloft and saw his shoulders broad

Already vested with that planet’s beam,

Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.”

“What’s that?” Jack said, catching up.

“Poetry.”

“I thought it was. You like poetry, man?” Baker and Odgeson overtook them: Brian heaved a swig from his waterbottle. “Sure.” He was bone-tired and exhilarated, caught in the jungle with water that seemed continually pouring through his heart. They tramped on, boots clashing over beds of small stones, stepping carefully across green-mould rocks. The peak was out of sight. A bird in the stream brought them to the foot of another waterfall. The file became a group, realized it was impossible to scale the cliff, made another file that went into the jungle.

Brian dragged himself up by a bush root, eyes following the slow-lifting pair of mud-stained boots in front. Sixteen hundred yards a day was still the average. You’d starve on piece-work at sixpence a hundred. Even a bob wouldn’t be much cop. We’ll go ten times as quick on the way down, though if I do come on another lark like this I wain’t carry so much stuff. Eighty pounds is a mug’s game, tins of snap chafing my back to boggery when all we need is a load of biscuits and a few mashings o’ tea and sugar. Like the Japs: a bundle o’ rice and off they went.

Coming out of the jungle, the stream had narrowed: large fallen trees lying more often across it had either to be clambered over or crawled underneath. They came to the foot of a water falling from the sky itself. It shook down in white streams, scarves gathered at evenly spaced ledges, and was transported with slow-intentioned gentleness into a pool of clear green water. “Maybe that’s the top of the mountain,” Odgeson said hopefully, but it turned out not to be. The watercourse no longer roared, was thinner and more rhythmic in its travelling the higher they climbed. To reach the escarpment top meant another spell among the trees. There were no paths and they kept by instinct to the line of the stream. Brian chopped and hacked until his muscles turned as dead as the wood under his feet. Fallen trees, overgrown with shrubbery and blocking his way, often proved to be no more than huge cylinders of purple soil held into shape by the tree’s covering of bark, which took longer to decompose: he stepped on to what had once been a tree or log and sank into soft soil. The only sign of life came from a few ants scurrying busily over the leaves or one or two leeches looping towards them like pieces of live bootlace. The whole place stank like a shit-house, Kirkby called on taking over the lead. When they stood still there was no sound but the distant spate of water from the falls or the music of a few birds in the treetops. And when they moved there was only the crashing of six men imposing their momentary will on the primeval forest, a splitting of shrubbery soon lost down the empty valleys. In the flashpan sunlight of a sudden emergence to the stream, an iguana darted into hiding.

On a ledge overlooking the valley, they hacked bushes down to make room for a fire and beds. Jack found a huge, beautifully green grasshopper with antennae-like feelers going out from it. Brian edged it away with his boot, but Jack slammed it with the rifle-butt. It still wouldn’t move, so Baker came up with the shotgun and blew it to bits. A battery of mess-cans sizzled on the fire: spam, meat and veg, tea, fruit pudding, cheese and biscuits. By seven those not on guard crept under the nets to sleep.

Brian and Knotman took the first two hours, talked in low voices: “What are you going to do when you get out?”

“Find a job, I expect,” Brian said. “I don’t know what at, though. I was on a lathe before I got dragged up: only a couple o’ years ago, but it seems a century. Christ, I’ll be glad to get back to Pauline, though.” This last wish came into the open before he had known she was on his mind, a fervent cry that surprised him in the pause that followed. “You get your ticket soon, don’t you?” he said, to break it.

Knotman reached to the fire for a light. “At Christmas — just a few months after you. They can get somebody else to guard their played-out Empire then. Not that they won’t, though: there’s one born every minute. They’ve made use of me for seven years, and now I’m going to do all I can to balls them up. Not by way of revenge, mind you: it’s just second nature, and I’ll enjoy doing it in a light-hearted sort of way.” He spoke in an easy, yet tired voice, giving Brian the impression that maybe it was possible for him to undermine the British Empire all by himself. “Sure sure, I volunteered to stay on in the air force”—having expected Brian to point this out — “but I was crazy, I admit that. I thought the Germans would want keeping under a few more years, but from fighting fascism I found myself helping the fascists out here. All I want to do now is get my hands on some hard work for a change, and if any of the friends I make happen to say they believe in the British Empire, I’ll be in a good position to tell ’em a few things about it. Not that I’ll get all hot and bothered, because they wouldn’t believe me if I did. No, I’ll drop it like a wise man who knows what he’s talking about.”

“You sound like a resistance fighter,” Brian laughed.

“No, I’m just talking. It’s so quiet in this jungle.”

“That’s what you think,” Baker called from under his net. “Don’t you two bolsheviks know that all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds?”

Dawn was grey, opened to a slow drizzle and the sound of Baker emptying his rifle down the valley, one bullet chasing another into silence while Knotman got up to make a breakfast of steam pudding and milk. An early start was planned against the summit, and waterbottles were dipped in what was left of the Sungei Pawan, because no more would be found until they crossed to watercourses on the far side of the mountain wall.

Breaking away from the stream, the undergrowth turned from moist into brittle and thorny, covering each hand and arm with shallow but livid tears, which in Brian’s flesh seemed to fester while he looked at them. It was no longer a question of conquering the mountain, to look out with pride and exultation from its summit, but only to keep on climbing, stay locked in the treadmill of intentions formed in idle dreamlike hours that had never comprehended the reality of this. What good’s it going to do us? he thought. Fuck-all. Crash — his kukri flew at a sapling of thorns, and down it went, held under by his agile boot so that Kirkby, following, wouldn’t be cut with it. They hoped to reach the top by evening and light a fire for all at the camp (twenty-five miles off) to see. The thought of this grandiose plan had excited him during the long weeks of preparation, but now that he was close to it his enthusiasm went, tempered to a hidden-away part of him by the long drag up from the coastal lowlands.

Bushes thinned, and for the next five hours they climbed without resting either to talk or drink water. Sweat, helped by the high-up blistering sun, poured out of him like a refugee soul, and after midday they walked into damp forest covering the steep surface of the escarpment — glad for once to enter it because the next clear daylight would come when they broke on to the actual summit. In places the vegetation gave way to grey-humped cliff, which on Knotman’s advice they circuited. “You wouldn’t be up to much if you slipped a couple of thousand feet,” he told Baker, who was all for going like a fly over the smooth surface. Then an hour was spent fighting another belt of thorn bushes, a strange misplaced preliminary to a pull-up through more wet forest, clinging to vines and creepers with the tenuous strength of curses and worn-out hands, arched laden backs crawling under fallen tree, boots caught in damp messes of soil. Brian no longer wanted to get to the top for the unparalleled view it would give (higher than any he’d seen) but only because the climbing would end, the expedition be as good as over. That in itself was enough to keep his legs moving. There’s no point in climbing a mountain unless there’s some purpose behind it, like to make a map or get food, collect wood or stake out a place to live, he thought, locked in his prison of leaves and branches that remained the same in spite of a continual movement.

Near the end of the afternoon the mountain top loomed above, a wide door of smooth rock with neither path nor footholds for fully loaded men. “It’s too steep to scale,” Odgeson said, and Brian followed his gaze between mosses and lichen, up and into grey sky. They shed packs and rifles to sit wearily between trees, wedging themselves so as not to slide down the steep ground. Knotman looked done for, smoked a cigarette: “To get around that cliff could mean another six hours. Even then, it might not be possible,” he said. “We might go round in circles and still find a slice of cliff facing us.”

Brian opened the map. “We’d have to go south-east for two or three miles. There’s a gap there.”

“Count me out,” Baker said. “It’d take days.”

“I’ve had my whack,” Kirkby said.

“And me, man,” said Jack.

“Maybe there’s still a way from here,” Brian persisted. To get up there seemed important again — now that hopes of being able to were fading. It was loony not to get to the top after struggling so far. Admittedly, they were all shagged out, but maybe with one last shin-up (an hour at the most) they’d be on that peak and making camp. He lifted Knotman’s kukri — feeling let-down by both him and Odgeson, who were, after all, supposed to be leading this foray. They were lost in some half-dream of cigarette smoke: “I’m off to see what I can find,” he said.

Knotman offered him a fag. “Have a smoke first.”

“When I come back.”

“Suit yourself.”

“You’ll be wasting your time,” Baker chipped at the tree-bole with his knife. Its sharp blade, digging with nonchalant dull strikes at the wood, sounded vicious and useless, an acknowledgment of defeat. “As long as I’m not wasting yourn,” he threw back. “It’s barmy to come all this way and then turn back.”

Knotman listened, sat back without interfering. He’d brought them this far and now they could make up their own minds about reaching the top. If they found it collectively important to do so, they’d see a way there — though as far as he was concerned there was no point in taking risks. The three-mile detour was impossible because it would mean perhaps two days without water. “I’m knackered,” Kirkby said. Jack suggested they bed down for the night and have a bash in the morning: “Once we’re over the summit there’ll be plenty of water.”

“I think we can call it off,” Odgeson said, and he was taken up on it: “Suits me,” Baker agreed quickly. “I didn’t like this picnic from the beginning.”

“Why did you come then?”

“For the experience.” Brian couldn’t argue against such an answer, unwilling to admit that his own reasons were felt to be deeper, if more diffuse.

From tracking the contours, he edged upwards, tunnelling like a collier through thick undergrowth, clambering over the fallen five-foot girth of trees that blocked his way. There was too much silence, and he wielded his kukri against ironwood to create the rough companionship of noise. Such a tree-filled wilderness put fear into him, and now and again he stopped in his crashed pathway as if to listen for its full effect, looked for ants, leeches, a snake maybe, but could see nothing except the swinging of his own arm when he went on. Kota Libis camp was years away, England a dream before he was born, Pauline walking to the shops on Aspley Lane a dim apparition; maybe since I came up here all the rest of the world’s turned to jungle and there’s nothing to go back to.

He climbed towards the summit, came by a green rockface blocking his way. He thought, among the claustrophobic desolation of this high jungle, of the waterfalls and pools several miles down towards the plain, of the stream’s noise, which had seemed so tormenting at the time but which now was remembered as a sort of heaven. Both places mixed before his eyes. He leaned to light a cigarette.

A clump of trees overhung the summit, rag-mops giving him the glad-eye from too far up. Maybe if I edge farther along I’ll find a chimney that’ll get me through in ten minutes. Above the rag-mops were grey and water-bellied clouds settling in for afternoon and evening. He was determined to reach the summit and, looking along the way he might take, saw a coiled python placed a dozen feet away.

He was protected by a screen of horror, within which a hand went to his shoulder only to find that he had forgotten his rifle. As he backed away, the stripes and diamonds began to move, to perform a colourful oscillation along the ground, over trees and roots; it was bigger than any he’d seen in the snake temples of Pulau Timur or the paddy field at Kota Libis. He went downhill, from tree to tree-bole, still watching the snake, which wound back into its sluggish coils now that he wasn’t too close. His fear of it went, for somehow being without a rifle there seemed no need to hurry or panic, and in the shadowy gloom he lost sight of it. Then his fear came back and he fled towards the others, no longer feeling alone in the jungle. He didn’t mention having seen the python: “I can’t find any way round or up,” he grumbled, before sinking down for a rest, glad that no one retorted: I told you so.

Knotman hitched up his pack and rifle, and the rest followed, threading a way between trees and bushes. A different set of muscles came into play for the descent, and Brian’s legs ached and stung as he steadied himself on the steep slope so as not to be slung forward against some hard tree. A slow drizzle fell, and in the dusk Brian and Kirkby spread their blanket into a rough cradle between two bushes, sat down to chew biscuits. Jack rammed a bayonet into a tin of jam and handed it around, but there was no energy to forage among the tins for a more elaborate meal — and no dry wood on which to cook it. “The sooner we get back to camp now, the better,” Kirkby said.

“Maybe they’ll rustle up something good at the cookhouse when we do,” Knotman laughed, “like hummingbirds’ foreskins on toast, or some such thing.” On their bleak dark four-thousand-foot ledge Brian felt as if the party had shrunk in numbers, they were so isolated and dispirited. He counted them: six, yet wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen only two or three, thinking that maybe a fire would have made a bigger crowd out of them. Perched high in the saturated air and mountainous vegetation, miles from the nearest spark of light, he couldn’t fight through the steel band of exhaustion towards sleep, was afraid that if he did he would roll off the ledge and perhaps spill against some tree.

He lay all night with a built-in sensation of closed eyes roaming through some demanding wilderness of half-sleep, the trammels of an exhausted mind and body searching for something impossible to find, then grieving over the fact that it might never be found even in a thousand hours of real sleep. The hard curve of rocks and soil under the blankets troubled him distantly, though less than the damp mist coldly moistening his face. Such uneasy rest was a variation on great silences, broken by fire within and a furious crashing of noise that often dragged him half-back to consciousness, as though a force over which he had neither control nor resistance fastened itself at his entrails and sent him into more coughs until the sound of it woke him up. Kirkby grunted and nudged, causing someone else to curse at the dearth of real sleep. Aware of his aching bones, he opened his eyes on the off-chance of encouraging sleep should he close them again decisively, but then found he had no desire to close them, and lay for what he could have sworn was a long time, looking into the silhouettes of bush leaves and humped bodies roundabout.

It often seemed that dawn was about to appear: when the shape of bush leaves began imperceptibly to change, he kept his eyes closed for as long as he could bear it, imagining that when he opened them the leaves would have taken on colour, and hoping that before he could witness this miracle of change no voice would yell that it was time to get up, or that Baker’s buckshot-gun wouldn’t start the day like a newly sharpened tin-opener ripping across the dark sky to let in sunlight. But he never slept more than a few minutes (which had nevertheless seemed like hours), so that the leaves before him were still outlined with the same blackness against tree-boles behind.

When day did come, it approached like thought: impossible to say from where. Grey light crept out of the fibre of each bush, escaped from thin leaf veins to show bodies sleeping roundabout and tree trunks developing a neutral though positive shade. They rolled blankets in silence, were damp and exhausted, each face showing the bewildering fight of attempted sleep. Baker passed around biscuits spread thickly with jam, hard to get down the throat on a swallow of water.

Mist cleared while they were packing, a curtain drawn from a vast area of north Malaya. Below and far into the distance, long bars of white mist were drifting across lesser summits and spurs, breaking up over rice fields and coastal swamps as the sun gained strength. Smaller hills of Gunong Barat reared at them from across the valley, whose waterline, hundreds of feet below, was buried deep in the green furrowed jungle.

Loftier mountains, far to the south, formed a low line of blue amorphous summits in the far-off sky. Small villages were dotted about the coast, lay in loops and bends of silver rivers that twisted from the hills towards greener landscapes, mingled with mangrove swamps, and entered the indistinct frontiers of the sea.

“That’s a view and a half,” said Jack. “It’s a pity you can’t drink it, though.” Baker thought it the least they could expect after a four-day climb. Brian had nothing to say, yet when they began filing down into the forest, he held back and was the last to leave. It was too much to grasp in a mere few minutes, impossible to carry away so soon. He wanted to stay until the sight of it drove him down by its familiarity, to sit where he was for a long smoke and look of contemplation at the land spread out below in choicer and more living colours than the most artistically produced map. All this climb, he thought, hearing the others already on the crashing descent, and I’ve got to leave it. I might never come up here, or any other such mountain, again — which put such a dismal shadow over his heart that the next thing he knew he was ploughing with drawn kukri into the cool gloom and familiar dank smells of the wood.

They came to the brink of a precipice, a thousand-foot sleeve of grey rock on the mountainside blocking the way to water farther west, so they backed up three hundred feet and found a thin ledge with a few bushes and shrubs growing on its surface. Baker pushed his paybook into Brian’s hand: “My will’s in there.” Brian shrugged and stuffed it into his shirt pocket: “Don’t blame me if I lose it, you loon.”

Knotman dropped his pack and was feeling a way over, looking like a brigand with unshaven face, dirty clothes, and rifle sticking above his broad shoulders. He spanned the first gap, his legs a pair of compasses about to draw a circle in empty air, hands clutching the rock above. The sky was blank below him for hundreds of feet, a few insecure bushes sprouting out occasionally. Fascinated by such peril, Brian wondered whether it would have been lessened had they talked among themselves and ignored him. Jack threw down his cigarette and leapt forward, even before Knotman’s boot-studs had stopped sliding.

He hung from a bush, his boots waving methodically about for a foothold: “Stay where you are,” he called hoarsely. “I’ll be all right.” Brian already wondered how they’d get down to the plain if Knotman brained or injured himself, and how they’d find him if he fell like a stone into the treetop forest below.

He made footholds, coaxed the fair weight of his body slowly back, his rifle a guiding finger of safety at the ledge he was trying to reach. He stayed still a moment, seemed to relax his efforts as if uncertain whether or not it was worthwhile saving himself. No one spoke, fearing to break the spell of survival: then he gathered strength for a terrific pull-up, and was on the ledge from which he had fallen.

He organized a chain to get the rest of them over. Brian stood with feet spanning two gaps in the rockface, unafraid only because he resisted looking up or down as he reached for packs and rifles passed to him, easing them over his chest to the next pair of hands.

On the other side they sat for a smoke, and Brian unhooked his waterbottle. “I’d save it,” Knotman said.

Brian opened the map: “We’ll reach water soon.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Knotman replied. So he didn’t drink, though his throat felt like cracked celluloid.

They went in single file, bushes curving overhead, wet leaves brushing hands that swung at creepers as they skirted the roots of great trees — against which they occasionally crashed if accelerated by weakness and a top-heavy load. Brian felt done-for, and crouched under creepers rather than drag energy to his bones and chop them out of the way. The brown whip-like tail of a snake disappeared through the leaves, a sight that cleared his vision and gave back strength. The last thing he wanted was a skinful of poison, so he walked upright. He stayed in the lead to go at his own rate rather than follow someone else’s pack, for the more exhausted he grew the quicker became his pace — though never so great that the others were left too far behind. A look of effort marked everyone: they came down with kukris no longer used, and loads bearing no resemblance to the neat shape of a pack. Their shirts were dark with sweat and soil patches, trousers and sleeves torn, faces set hard with tiredness, and a week’s growth under slouched bush hats — coming through the tunnels of the forest, fatigued at having climbed a small upshoot of the earth on which they were lost like insects.

He turned, to slosh at creepers in a new-found strength that kept him ahead, swinging with joy down each bank that lay in his path, until one led him between lips of brown soil that formed the dry bed of a stream. He followed it, stepping over lichen-covered boulders, and soon saw water jerking out of a spring, the beginning of a stream copious enough to sink his tin mug when he threw it in. “I was ready to do a Rupert Brooke on you,” Baker said, “in the corner of this foreign field. Brian has my will, so it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“We were lucky to find water so soon,” Odgeson thought.

“It was due to my good navigation,” Brian claimed. “I steered by the sun and had my map open all the way.”

“You couldn’t see the sun,” Baker cried, pulling off his boots, “and the map you drew is no bloody good.”

“You won’t be able to get them on again if they’re wet,” Knotman said. Baker ignored him: “I could have steered better with my cock,” he called to Brian.

“If there’d bin a brothel down here, I suppose you could.”

Tributaries came in by thorn-covered gullies as they tramped along, unnoticeable until threads of water were elbowed from under bushes by their side. They reached an island in the stream and split up for the evening tasks. Baker sat on a rock in his underwear, patching his trousers, while Jack and Brian were high up the bank, filling the air with the splinter of branches and dragging wood back to the fire.

It grew dark, and water formed two phosphorescent humps as it dropped into a deep pool at the foot of the cliff face. Fire shadows danced at the bordering wall of the forest a few yards away, and they ate a hot meal, back in the familiar sound of water travelling out of nowhere into nowhere, a stream that hurried by six men locked in the shadows of the forest, mocking the purposelessness of their journey as it passed.

Brian lit a cigarette and lay back, stars like the eyes of fishes set between black tree-shapes towering about. The primeval noise of the water receded into another locker of his mind, leaving his immediate senses in a vacuum of half-consciousness. Then the noise poured back into his brain and ears and he heard Baker say: “It looks as if Seaton’s asleep”—so he pulled off his shirt and swilled himself in the icy water, then, in spite of its sting, fell straight into a deep blank slumber.

Waking early, he was glad to be getting out of the forest. Now that there was no such obsessive goal as reaching the peak, he felt its spirit imposing too heavily on him, saw the jungle for the desert it was, a dull place because no one of flesh-and-blood lived there. All you could do was burn it down, let daylight and people in; otherwise it was only fabulous and interesting when written about in books for those who would never see it. Still, he’d always be able to say he’d been in the jungle, tell anybody who asked that the best thing was to leave it alone, but that if you had to see it you should get a few thousand feet up and look down on it. He could easily understand how the jungle would drive you crackers if you had to stay there too long; how its great forest-mind could eat you up with the dark grin of possession. He sent a nub-end spinning into the stream, watched it taken to where they would follow.

They descended by the winding defile, taking to jungle at midday to avoid stone-faced waterfall cliffs. The panic flight of tin-footed minuscular fugitives sounded on the foliage roof, a commencing tread of raindrops before the full weight of water crashed on to them, spattering hats and finding a short-cut to their skins. Soil and leaves made anchors of their boots as they slithered down, edging back to the stream. Brian shouted through the wall of rain: “One minute dry; the next drenched.” Baker, only a foot away, heard nothing.

“That was a big piss,” Knotman said when they stood by the stream. Clouds were scattering, and shirts steamed on bushes in the returning sun. An Avro 19 droned like a silverfish high overhead towards Burma, and Brian waved in greeting. Brown water swirled at their thighs as they slowly descended, and when the sun burned, Brian’s shirt felt pasted to his shoulder blades, a poultice that increased the aches instead of lessening them. By map and compass they were close to where the lorry had brought them nearly a week ago. A score of tins remained, dragged up and down the mountain for nothing. “We might as well dump ’em,” Kirkby suggested.

Knotman didn’t agree: “You’ve a month’s rations there, in right-little tight-little England.”

They came out of the jungle. Stubbled, tired, bush hat pulled down, Brian felt he could have travelled for weeks more, until he reached the dam over the stream and collapsed on to its concrete platform, held there for a minute by a wild saw-toothed cough that left him without breath, sitting still and trying to bring trees and sky back into focus. He watched the others emerge: Jack with his shirtsleeve torn away; Knotman limping because he hadn’t had his boots off for days; Odgeson chalk-white and walking carefully as if afraid he might fall, while Kirkby and Baker looked fit by comparison.

Odgeson went to the planter’s house and telephoned for a lorry from the camp. They set off four miles to meet it at the main road, a slow straggling file all but done for after the rapid descent. Brian was at the end of his strength, faint itches chafing at various parts of his body where leeches still fed. I don’t feel as though I’ve got enough blood left to keep myself going, never mind them, the greedy bastards. I’m pole-axed, and wish I was in Nottingham out of this blood-sucking sun, back where it’s cool and my brain will clear so’s I can start to think, pick up the bones of my scattered thoughts. I’ll be twenty-one next year, and an old man before I know it.

Packs were swung like corpses on to the waiting lorry, helped by a sergeant who had come up for the ride, the same who had got Baker in trouble outside the admin hut last week. “There’s a war on,” he told them. “It started while you were away. We thought you might have got caught up in it.”

“What sort of a war?”

“The Communists are at it, trying to throw us out of the country and take over. They’ve killed a lot of people already.”

The lorry drove south along the main road, through villages and rubber plantations, the sea a perfect blue sheet to the right, sky equally blue and empty overhead. A breeze cooled them and took away the heavy smell of soil and sweat. No one spoke. Brian leaned back with eyes closed, wondering at the sergeant’s words about a war with the Communists in Malaya.

CHAPTER 24

Almost every day of his life Brian had heard his mother say she was going to pack up and leave Harold Seaton. But she never had, and on those days when there was no cause to say it, she dwelt on the still-hot embers from other quarrels. Before coming to work this morning Brian had a real set-to with his father. The house had been a boiling sea of sabre-toothed rows this last week because Seaton had been observed by a neighbour drinking in a Lenton pub with a woman he’d knocked-on with before he met Vera: black-haired, inscrutable Millie from Travers Row — now long since married herself. Not that such a brazen cheeky-daft outdacious baggage would let anything like that stop her, Vera raved when Seaton came home all fussy and pleased with himself, unsuspecting that a neighbour had got in with a colourful story half an hour ago. In times past, fed up to the teeth and eyeballs with him, the whole family had heard Vera say he could clear off and get another woman for all she cared, but now that there were reasonable grounds for thinking that he might, the house witnessed pitched battles that even made the money quarrels of the dole days look like the pleasant tit-for-tat of a lively courtship.

It gave Brian something to think about during the long hours of watching the dead-slow traversing of his piece-work milling machine. He fixed an aluminium elbow into the jig, released the lever, and sent it towards the revolving cutters, making sure that the sudpipe was well aimed against it — otherwise it might seize-up and spray hot metal against his skin. His mother had kept up her tirade for days, even though Seaton had promised faithfully never to see Millie again. Brian asked his mother to pack it up now, saying it was no use going on and on and keeping the house in misery, but she replied: “Why should I? He’s allus bin a bogger to me, and this is the last thing I’m going to stand for from ’im, especially now yo’ lot’s growing up.” So Seaton went on being put through the mill, using a rare control and saying nothing because he knew himself to be in the wrong, until this morning when he was dragged into the blackest and most impressive rage Brian had ever seen and threatened to bash Vera’s head in. Brian stood between them intending to bash his in if he laid a finger on her. “He thinks you’re still a baby and can’t stick up for me,” Vera bellowed, halfway between rage and tears. She was triumphant: “I allus said he’d have to watch his step when you grew up. Now he knows what I mean.” Brian was baffled, caught in a fire of despair, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do much if the mad eyes and beefy fists of his father made a move. “Christ,” he shouted, his voice brittle, “can’t you both act better than this? It’s about time you learned more sense.” Maybe they caught the impending crack of his spirit; for the raw feelings of cold and early morning were drawn from all three gradually as tea was mashed and poured out. No one spoke, but twenty minutes later Seaton had been thawed by a fag, and his good morning to Vera was almost cheerful — though it stayed unanswered.

Brian was glad to get away, pedalling his bike along Castle Boulevard, playing the fast and tricky daredevil between cars and buses to keep his mind blank. Speed brought drops of water to his eyes and cheeks; the spring air was fresh and cold, good because the world was waking up with the buds and blue sky. High above, on a wall of rearing sandstone rock, towered the Castle, an art museum and prison for deserters. It crouched like a spider with the beaten soul of the city in its mouth, a Union Jack fluttering on high. Brian cycled as part of the river of people flowing to work along the traffic artery far below, happier when once he’d passed it by and was already halfway through Canal Street. It seemed that the war was finishing, that soon the world would open for travel like a South Sea pearl. He could save money and go to France or Italy, free because call-up would stop with the battles. Yet perhaps it wouldn’t be as good as he imagined: Edgeworth’s would lose its War Office contracts and he’d be slung on the dole like his old man had been, unable to get a job anywhere, trapped for life in a queue every Tuesday and Thursday for a few measly bob to starve along on. Starve-along-Cassidy, that’s what I’ll be. “Don’t believe it, though”—an uncluttered stretch of cobbled short-cut allowed him to talk aloud as if before an audience — “the soldiers’ll be back and wain’t stand for dole queues any more, government contracts or no. They’ll get the Reds in and then we’ll have plenty of work. Yo’ see’f they don’t. And not all of Fatguts’s spouting about good old England and all that rammel will stop ’em either.”

Cycling into the endless streets of Sneinton made him happy, a spirit retained even when he passed the house by which he’d fought with the husband of that bag Edna, picked up in the Langham last autumn. What a night! His black eye lasted a fortnight, and he only hoped the other bloke’s had taken as long to disappear. When Bert came home three months later his side of the story was spilled: Rachel had taken him to bed and he’d had the time of his life, including breakfast on a tray in the morning. Bert had all the luck, though he couldn’t but laugh as he skidded into the street on which was Edgeworth’s Engineering Ltd.

It was a small firm, one long building of sixty workers, and two side offices at the street-end, where a typist drew up the Friday wages. The glass-pannelled door took him into a cul-de-sac of waist- and breast-high machines, lit by blue fluorescent gleams from overhead. Belts under the ceiling ran races with each other, pinjoints clicking against motor-driven wheels. Ted Edgeworth, the owner, worked like one of the men, tall and miserable with long grey hair, dressed in a boiler suit only different from the rest in that it was changed every day instead of once a week. His wife came in often to see him, drove down in a flash car from their bungalow by fresh-aired Thurgarton. Not to help, but to stand by his side while he fiddled with some blueprint or component on his bench at the end of the shop. Their backs were to the workers, but it was safely assumed that she nagged him black and blue over some long-corroding domestic detail because, though no words were heard above the drone and roar, the back of his beanpole neck stayed bright red whilever she was there. Maybe it’s because she caught him with some fancy woman or other a few years back and wain’t let him forget it, though that’s not likely because Ted is a bit pansyish if anything, the way he puts his hand on your shoulder when explaining a new job. Maybe it is something like that: you never know, what with having such a cat-faced scrag-end of mutton for a wife, and two sons in the army who didn’t want to take over the business.

When Mrs. Edgeworth stayed away, there was Burton the government inspector from Birmingham to give him hell, as like as not. Poor old Ted. Burton was a real Hitler who played on the fact that Ted was a timid old bastard, even though he was a boss, one who couldn’t answer back too much because he was salting thousands away out of the fat government contract whose work Burton came every now and again to inspect. He was bigger than Ted, well-built and pan-mouthed, and let himself go into rages about inferior work that Ted was trying to palm off on a government that had had all the money in the world to spend since 1939. Two thousand nuts went one week to a Birmingham gun factory and all of them had been drilled and threaded so much off centre that the guns would have killed our own blokes instead of the Jerries. Burton made a special trip up in his car and saw boxes of them still being blithely turned off on a row of lathes. He pushed by poor flummoxed Ted, stood at the boxes with his battleship jaw fixed on his gauges, and then carried one back to Ted’s bench. Even over the noise of machinery you could hear him shouting, and he ended up by knocking — maybe an accident, but nobody ever knew — the whole box of them over the floor. After he’d stalked out and driven off, Ted started screaming at his tool-setters and viewers, but not near enough to get his own back.

Ructions, everywhere you went, though Brian hoped it would get quieter at home after this morning’s bust-up. The house was too small and so was the factory: often Brian would load his saddlebag with sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and a map and take off into the country, pedalling north through the open fields and scrub-lands of Sherwood Forest. The smell of tree bark in spring reminded him of his far-off days at the Nook, and of his not-so-distant ramblings over the Cherry Orchard with Pauline. Ructions with her it had been as well, though things had got better lately. Some months after their parting he’d been walking along the open pavement by the Council House lions one Sunday evening with Albert Lomax, and had spotted Pauline talking to a couple of other girls on the steps. Everyone was out in their Slab Square best, perambulating to either get or give the eye; perhaps in an odd moment stopping to hear a few words of admonition from Sally’s Army, or soak up a bit of sound advice from some Communist speaker, or argue with a Bible-backed old god in a trilby hat — who was so thin you’d think somebody had nicked his ration book.

Pauline waved at Brian’s smile as if she were glad to see him. He’d never noticed before how pale she was. You’d think she’d got jaundice by the look of her. He went up the steps, followed by Albert. “Hey up, duck. How yer gooin’ on?”

“All right.”

“You want to come out of the wind or you’ll get a cold.” Though it was so long since their quarrel, he still felt affection for her. Her friends stood to one side, made sharp responses to the calls of passing youths. He also felt jealous at the world of time that had fallowed between them, some land of other-occurring days lost and never to be known. Why does it make so much difference? They should have been closer, and he considered it her fault they weren’t. “I feel marvellous,” she said. “I ain’t ’ad a cold for weeks. Where you off?”

“A walk. Where yo’?”

“A walk.” Picking up lads, he thought, like her pals now talking to some — feeling rotten against himself for these unspoken words, because Pauline seemed to have less ebullience and stature than when he had last been with her. “Do you still go to the Capitol on Sat’day nights?”

“No.” She was absorbed by people moving around the square, as if wanting to be among them and away from this meeting that she had, by a characteristic lapse towards good nature, let herself in for. “I didn’t think you did,” he admitted, now hoping to get her going with him again, “because I often go there to see if I can spot you.” She didn’t, as he wished, take him up on this, and they stood awkwardly. It was a fact that he’d haunted the cinema the last few weekends to see if she would get off a 7 or 22 and walk slowly towards the queue he stood in — though knowing that such meetings never happened when expected or encouraged, came only when all thought of them was deep in hiding, like now. Her friends had dismissed the youths, and even Albert was impatient for a walk up Trent. “How’s your dad?” Brian asked, offering a cigarette, which was refused.

“He’s dead.”

The beginning of an ironic laugh came, a disbelieving start to a sentence that would have been catastrophic if he hadn’t pulled himself up in time: “You.…”

“He died about six weeks ago,” she said, his doubt unnoticed. Disbelief withered, was overpowered at what he saw was the residue of grief in her pallid face and the damaged spirit of her slightly glowing eyes. He remembered the exact physical centre of the blow, as if someone had struck him by the left eye, dazed his senses, so that he took her arm — which seemed to her a gentle pressure of sorrow. But he shouted angrily: “Why didn’t you let me know?”

She drew back. “I couldn’t very well telephone you, could I, loony?”

“You knew where I lived, didn’t you?”

“Well,” she shouted back — and Albert stood amazed at this unexpected blaze-up of a quarrel — “you knew where I lived as well, didn’t you?” Which floored him with its logic and quieted him down: “I’m sorry about your dad, duck. I liked him a lot, you know that.”

“I know you did,” she said, half-jeering still, enraged at him for starting a row where so many people might hear and notice. “But don’t mek me cry, though, will yer?”

“All right, then: I was just trying to say how sorry I am.” They stood in the path of a raking wind, and he wondered why she and her pals chose such a perch to flirt with lads. She turned from him, in some deep way insulted, though he couldn’t see how. “You could have called for me,” she said. “You didn’t think I was going to run after you, did you?” He’d never thought that at all, he argued, knowing that to knock at her house and ask if Pauline was in would have been too simple; he preferred to hang around the pictures in the hope of seeing her on the off-chance; and in any case, much of his time had been taken up boozing and gelling with Albert, just as it looked as though hers had been occupied ladding with her pals. There were ten sides to every story, when you came to think about it, but he didn’t want to tell her this — and perhaps upset her even further. The fact that Mullinder had died caused an emptiness even of air inside him, leaving nothing for his lungs to draw on. “Come up to the club next week,” he said, expecting her to swing round and tell him to clear off. “You’ll have a good time,” he added. “Albert brings his girl as well.”

She turned and smiled: “If you like. As long as it i’n’t on a Wednesday, because I wash my hair that night.”

“Thursday’s the night,” he told her, believing again in happiness. “You look perished, duck: let’s go off and get a cup o’ tea somewhere.” She ditched her pals and went with him, and had gone to the club every week since. The old times came back, though different. He thought about them as he set the miller spinning, invincible steel teeth biting soft as butter into aluminium castings, gouging out grooves with such exactitude that even Burton wouldn’t be able to complain. Sud-drenched splinters spat over the jigs and tray, cleared away every so often with a specially provided handbrush. Pauline had taken to the club like a duck to water, and though they still had violent rows, they usually made up before the good-night kiss. Nowadays there was less of the rough stuff, both of them not so eager to tread on the fine gauze of self-control and descend into thumped-up quarrels. Brian was gentler and more protective, learned to see that her previous tom-lad bouts were only indulged in so as to be like one of the rest. Even so, she sometimes became angry at his continual solicitude, but would have hated him to lose his temper over such resentment and go back to his old retaliatory ways. Their lovemaking was a natural prolongation of calm and seemingly endless walks together, showing that a new stage of tenderness had been reached.

Grandfather Merton saw them arm-in-arm one evening, copped Brian at it, as he told Vera later, talking to his girl like any love-struck youth as they walked along in the spring dusk. Merton was over seventy, had a lean sardonic face that at one time had reminded Brian of a cross between a strengthened Dox Quixote and the head of George V on the back of coins; but Merton was cleanshaven, a blacksmith mixture of both, an upright man in the prime of his old age who still knocked back his seven or eight pints of Shippoe’s every day, much to the disgust of Lydia — who thought it time he packed it in a bit, though not daring, even now, to tell him so. Afraid once upon a time of the stick he beat his dogs with, she was, at forty-five, still wary of him lifting the stick he sometimes allowed to accompany him on his walks. Lydia was unmarried, lived at home, and, as she told Vera and Ada many a time: “The old man’s still a bogger, leads poor mother such a dance as well that I can’t help thinking it’ll be a good job when he’s out the road.” But Merton had always been gaffer, and would stay that way. “I’ll drink what I bloody-well like,” he said when Mary told him about it. “As long as you’ve got enough snap on the table, don’t try and tell me what I can and can’t do.” And knowing how much he liked his ale — and his own way — she didn’t mention it again. In any case he was never so drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing. During a period when Harold Seaton was amiably disposed towards his in-laws, he called there at midday one Sunday and went out with Merton for a drink.

They took a bus to the Admiral Rodney in Wollaton Village, walked back a mile to the Crown under blue sky and fresh-smelling wind, then to the Midland, the White Horse, the Jolly Hig’lers — the distance between each pub shrinking as they got into Radford — ending at the Gregory with Harold groggy on his feet, fuddled with beer fumes and fagsmoke, wrestling with the earth-pull at the calves of his legs, while Merton stood up tall, sliding a pint into himself now and again between casual called-out remarks to some pal or other. Considering, Seaton thought, what a hard old sod he’d been to his family, it was surprising he was so well liked by all and sundry. Still, Merton worn’t a bad owd stick at times, and you couldn’t deny as he’d wokked ’ard either. Seaton took him in small doses, enjoyed bumping into him but made sure it didn’t happen too often. Even now, over forty himself, he felt too much like a son when with him, and because his own father had been dead twenty years he resented Merton’s natural sense of domination.

Seaton liked his beer as much as anybody, which gave him something in common with his father-in-law. A five-pound wage-packet made him well-off, and on weekend nights he would go out with Vera and let his voice rip on the old songs that he liked, his brown eyes, broad sallow face, and black receding hair set against his favourite corner in the Marquis of Lorne. For the first time since getting married he was able to buy a suit — utility and illfitting — but one in which he felt compact and proud, boss of himself when away from work. He had money to buy wood and paint and nails, spare parts for his bicycle and wireless set, but these materials for brightening home and life were hard to find because of the war. He made do and did what he could, though he considered he got little thanks for it from his wife and five kids. What was the use? A bloke couldn’t even have a row with his missis without his son getting up and threatening to bash him. Still, he’ll know different some day. He felt grieved that he seemed to get little love from anyone after all he’d done for them this last twenty years: serving two months in jail to pay for the grub he’d got on strap, which had been no picnic either; not to mention his odd-job versatility and force-put cunning in dodging the means-test man.

I reckon Brian thinks a lot o’ me, though, even after our bit of an argument the other day, because last year he bought me a new set of teeth for nine quid when I’d lost my others being sick down the lavatory after a booze-up. It must a took him a long time to save all that out of his wages, so I don’t think we hate each other even if we do have our ups and downs. By God, you can’t have everything, you can’t. We’re lucky to have some work and grub and not get blown to bits, I do know that much. With his labouring spade he spent all day at the bicycle factory loading mountains of brass dust and splinters from the auto shop on to lorries for the scrap trucks over the road. Just turned forty, he was stocky and of iron strength and knew he would have flattened Brian in ten seconds if it had come to a smash that morning, though, unlike Merton, he found it easier to knock his wife about than his children: the idea of fighting with solid hard-working Brian seemed an impossible disaster; while Merton on the other hand had knocked his lads about, but never Mary.

Brian didn’t mind meeting his grandfather when walking along Wollaton Road with Pauline, and noted the mischievous wink in his eye: “Hey up, Nimrod, where are you off to, then?”

“A walk.”

Merton looked at Pauline: “A bit o’ courting, eh? I suppose you’re off up Cherry Orchard?”

Christ, Brian said to himself, he wain’t say the right thing now. “Maybe,” he grinned.

“What’s your name, me duck?” Pauline told him. He’ll run me off if I’m not sharp, Brian thought. I’ll let me gra’ma know if he does, though. “I wondered if you might be going to Abyssinia,” Merton laughed, turning to Pauline: “The young bogger used to say that, when he was a kid. If I got on to him and made him wok too ’ard, he’d get up and shout: ‘Bogger you all, I’m off.’ ‘Where yer off to?’ his auntie Lydia would say. ‘Abyssinia,’ he’d tell us, and run back to Radford. He was a bogger when he was a lad.” Brian wondered how Merton could have invented such a tale on the spur of the moment — then realized it was true, and that while it had been buried deep in him and may have seemed a century ago if he’d remembered it at all, it appeared only a year or two back and as plain as a door to Merton. What else will he come out with? he wondered.

Pauline laughed: “Well, he’s still a bogger, if you ask me.”

“I allus knew he would be,” Merton said, ready to be on his way. “So long, then, Brian. Look after yourselves, both o’ yer.”

“He’s nice, your grandad,” was Pauline’s verdict, as they turned towards the Cherry Orchard to make love in some hump-lipped hollow of the dusk, and be there an hour in silence before piped notes of cuckoos nipped out on the echo from Snakey Wood.

The club was noisy and popular, absorbed those youths and girls from streets roundabout who snubbed any suggestion of joining a cadet force, yet wanted a place to meet friends once a week. Two middle-aged women of the Co-op and Labour Party ran it, organized talks (mostly political) and saw that the evening ended with hot tea and sandwiches. After being at hard work all day, a lightness or lack of weight crept into Brian’s bones on getting the body back into motion after a twenty-minute sit-down slump at the tea table, energy recalled by a second wind of fatigue and fought by a cold breeze footballing it down from the Pennines when, having thrown off his heavily greased overalls and had a good swill at the sink, he walked the odd mile to the club.

Frank Varley met him at the school gate, a crafty smile on his lean handsome face. “Hey, Bri”—he waved a wad of paper from the step-tops — “have yer seen this one?” He was the pen-pusher of the gang, worked in an insurance office down town, and somehow got hold of dirty stories that were given to him, he swore blind, by his brother when home on leave from a signals battalion at Catterick. Brian inwardly disputed the truth of this, wondered whether or not Horace Varley sat at his typewriter all day making them up, though if he did they were bleddy good and he was on his way to earning big money as a journalist. Somebody started ’em off, and that was a fact. Usually they were a dozen typed sheets of single-spaced narrative, the first one Frank handed around being about a special sort of club in India formed by officers’ wives to keep themselves happy while their husbands were away for months at a time. The goings-on described in Frank’s black-market tale made everybody’s hair curl — the girls’ included, for they wouldn’t be left out of such exotic readership. Another story described a week’s leave spent by a soldier in Rome, and the wad now handed to Brian as he entered the playground concerned, he discovered on stopping in the middle of the yard and not caring that those sitting on the far side knew what froze him, the adventures of a nubile young woman who kept a St. Bernard dog. Wind bent the pages back and he made this an excuse to turn round so that no one would witness the slow growth at his groin. The story ended when some man shot the dog because it attacked his little girl, and its mistress died of a broken heart. Brian read it again so that by the time he walked across to the others he need no longer feel ashamed.

He held it up: “Who’s next?”

“Nobody,” Frank said, a grin of triumph. “They’ve all read it”—indicating Pauline and Dorothy. Albert was immersed in his Soviet Weekly, bringing his squat head up now and again to spout out some marvellous fact about Russia: “It says here that ten years after the war nobody’s going to work more’n forty hours a week.”

“I don’t see how that can happen,” Frank said, folding up his sexual proclamation. And the cranky bleeder let the girls see it, Brian cursed. Think o’ that. He ought to have more sense.

“It’s easy,” Albert argued. “All you do is round up them bastards as never do a stroke o’ work: get ’em in the factories and on the railways.”

“Round up a few pen-pushers as well,” Brian put in, a punch at Frank. “All they do day in and day out is copy dirty stories, then come here at night and get a cheap thrill passing ’em round to girls.”

“He might,” Pauline said, “but I don’t get a thrill, I can tell you that. It just makes me laugh.”

“I think it’s disgusting,” Dorothy said, her round swarthy face flat and angry.

Frank laughed out loud: “Owd Dolly! You know you liked it.”

Albert set himself square like a boxer: “Lay off Doll. Nobody likes that sort o’ stuff, you pen-pusher.”

“We can’t all work a machine, you know,” Frank recoiled.

“Somebody’s got to reckon our wages up,” Pauline said, coming to his defence. “Not that it would take long to reckon up mine.”

“Don’t worry,” Brian said. “We’ll be better off as soon as we’ve beat the Jerries. We’ll get rid of Old Fatguts and vote a socialist government in.”

“You’ll still have to work, though, won’t you?” Dorothy called out sarcastically.

“Shurrup, sharp-shit,” Albert said, as if forgetting she was his sweetheart. “I don’t mind wokkin’.”

“You should wash your mouth out with soap,” she called.

“It don’t bother me either,” Brian argued. “As long as I get paid.”

“I don’t see why you’ve got to ’ave money,” Albert said. “I reckon you should be able to get all you wanted for nowt. As long as everybody worked, what difference would it make? I read in the Worker that it’d be possible for bread to be free in Russia one o’ these days. That’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”

Everybody thought so. “It’d tek a long time to come true, though,” Pauline added. Shadows lay heavily in the playground, from air-raid shelters to lavatories, gate to cycle-shed. The sky was blue, and starless unless you looked hard for a few seconds. A cold night was driven into the city like a lost traveller wanting warmth, harried on by an officious wind that scaled the wall and played around them. Coats were unobtrusively pulled together and buttoned.

“Suppose it took fifty years?” Brian said. “That’s nowt: the flick of a gnat’s left eyelid. As long as we start now. There’s enough snap and clo’es and houses for everybody.”

Frank was dubious: “It’d tek a lot o’ doin’.”

“I ain’t found anybody at wok as don’t want another government,” Brian put in. “’Ave yo’, Albert?” No one had. The end of the war was coming, and so were the days of change, a definite thing that everyone felt.

“Our old man wants a new ’un,” Dorothy said. “There was ructions at our house the other night when Fatguts was bellyaching on the wireless.” Albert spun round with a broad overpowering laugh: “O Christ, yes. Go on, tell ’em, love.”

“Well,” she gave him a mischievous look, “Owd Fatguts was going on and on, and dad ups and brings his grett fist down on the wireless. I thought he was going to bost all the valves. ‘Tek that,’ he says. And there was a big crack right across the top: ‘You old bogger,’ he says. Mam towd ’im not to be so daft, but when she said that, he hit it again, as if he was going off his loaf, and he kept on hitting it — ever so hard — until Owd Fatguts made as if he was coughing hissen to death and the wireless stopped. ‘I don’t ’ave to listen to that bleedin’ liar,’ dad says, and mam gets on to him then because he’s broke the wireless. But he just tells her to shurrup and says he’ll get a new one next week. He towd me later, when mam was upstairs, that he felt an electric shock when he gave it the last big crack.” Laughter engulfed them, like ice breaking.

“He saved England, though, didn’t ’e?” Frank Varley called from a few feet away.

“You reckon so?” Brian answered. “It was him and his gang as turned hosepipes on the hunger marchers before the war.”

“Old Fatguts was saving his own neck,” Albert said, “not ourn. He didn’t give a bogger about us. It was all his bleeding factory-owners he saved, the jumped-up bags like owd Edgeworth who’s making a fortune. You can’t tell me owt. I’ve got eyes and I use ’em to read wi’.”

“I can read as well, you know,” Varley retorted. “I get the Express on my way to work every day and I read all of it.”

Albert wasn’t in a quarrelling mood, laughed: “I read three papers every day, Frank, not one, because it’s best to get more than one opinion so’s nobody can say you’re biased. I get the Worker, the Herald, and the Mirror. And my old woman gets Reynolds on Sunday, so I have a goz at that as well.”

“We’ll make you Prime Minister in the next government,” Varley said. “Then you can boss it over vacant bleeders like us.”

“If I was Prime Minister,” Brian said, “I’d get rid o’ blokes who sit at wok all day typing dirty stories.”

Mrs. Dukes walked slowly over from the Infants’ door while Albert was reading aloud from his worn-out Soviet Weekly. She listened a minute before breaking in, regarding him as one of the most intelligent members of the club: “I’ll get Jack Taylor to come and talk to you in a week or two,” she said at last. “He’s a socialist and you’d like hearing him.”

“He’d have a job to convert us, Mrs. Dukes,” Brian laughed, “because we all are as well.”

“Still,” she said, “you’ve got to know more than you know.” And they went in to get their share of tea and sandwiches before splitting up for home.

He stood with Pauline by the back door of the Mullinders, and the end of their quiet evening blazed between them in a battlefire of kisses, bodies pressed close, and arms inside each other’s open coats. Neither wanted to leave, and time ran by. Pauline’s mother was in bed, had left her to a good-night kiss at her own risk. A cat scuffled before the lightless windows, a dog dragged its chain over the stone-cold monotonous paths of the estate gardens, and they were snug in the porch, out of the wind and half asleep against each other, warm and inexhaustible in a bout of long slow kisses. This is love, he said to himself. “I’ve never been in love like this, Brian,” she said into his ear.

“What?”

“I must go, and I don’t want to. I’ve got to go in now, duck.”

“Not yet,” he said.

“I don’t want to either.”

“Don’t yet then: I can’t let you go.”

“It’s comfortable,” she said. “I like being here, so close. I hope it’s allus marvellous like this.”

“It will be,” he told her. “I know what you mean. I mean I love you.”

“I shan’t go yet,” she answered. Work tomorrow, but so what? Work was the one definite landmark always visible at any moment from the delectable night before, so it didn’t matter whether you felt good or bad about it. He’d be able to get up no matter what time he went to bed.

The moon saw him home, following him on a long walk through the utter silence of allotment gardens, a cigarette to keep him warm, the smell and presence of it an added comfort along the same lonely footpath as when he had fled from the Nag’s Head clutching a couple of beer-mug handles five hundred years ago, Bert running after him to say it was all right. It is all right an’ all, he laughed, blowing out smoke against the damp air. In a few days the war would be over, and there was nothing on God’s earth to stop it ending. Then the world would change, at any rate be new to him, because he hadn’t been alive long enough to know what the ending of a war was like.

It finished well: wooden forms and bunks were dragged from airraid shelters and heaped on to bonfires. In the White Horse, a buxom loud-mouthed ear-ringed woman of fifty did a can-can on one of the tables, clattering her shoes among a ring of pint jars to the bashing of the rhythmical piano, cocking her legs up high to show — apart from her fat knees — that her baggy drawers had been made from the gaudy colours of a Union Jack.

Brian, sitting in the pub with Pauline and his parents, drained his pint and joined in the wild release of singing with the rest of the packed room, enjoying the empty thoughtlessness that went like flashpowder among the moving throng and only allowed the arms of the clock to move by the half-hour. Yet at certain moments he stopped singing to take in the dozens of faces, saw them as mere life-shapes with such sad clarity that even the sound they were making left his ears and drew back until he couldn’t listen any more. They were wild with excitement because the war had ended, yet the truth of it didn’t seem real to him. This was just a booze-up night, more joyous and violent than usual, but what difference would it make to everybody? They would wake up tomorrow with sore heads and see out of their windows the same backyards and line of lavatories, hear the same drone of factory engines. He remembered opening the Daily Mirror when just home from work a few days ago, coming to the double pages of the middle and seeing spread out before him something he would never forget: the death pits of Belsen, a scene of horror making a pincer movement through each eye to the middle of his brain. He closed the paper, every other word irrelevant, and the images stamped forever. But the end of the war meant something, he thought, lifting another pint his father put before him, a lot in fact: backyards and Belsen — and it meant getting rid of both.

But the beer stunned that part of him and, victory or no victory, he was kay-lied. Pauline, his mam and dad, all of them sat at a table roaring their guts out, arms around each other and happy, done for at last by the six-year desert of call-up and rationing, air-raids and martial law. All this was finished and victory had come, victory over that, even more than over the Germans, and what else could he want but to sing out his happiness in the biggest booze-up anybody could remember?

Vera and Seaton had been drinking all day, and Brian helped his father along Eddison Road at firelit midnight, Pauline behind with his mother and the children. Seaton leaned heavily, slurred his words, tried to apologize but clapped hand to mouth to stop his false teeth falling. Brian was flexible on his feet, sober enough to hold himself up as well as his father. “Come on, dad. Stop draggin’ or you’ll ’ave me down as well.” He turned: “Y’all right, mam?”

“I’ve got her,” Pauline said.

“I am, my owd duck,” his mother shouted, riotously plastered. “I’ll mek yer some supper when I get ’ome, my love.”

“Yer’ll ’ave a job.” Brian laughed at the earnest tone in her barely controlled voice. He felt love for them both: heavy Seaton, who pressed a firm hand on his shoulder to help himself along; his mother, happy and light-headed behind; above all for Pauline, who, by witnessing how totally they took to a good time, was in a way being as intimate with him as when they were in Strelley Woods together.

The last high flames were belting up from a bonfire at the end of the terrace. Gertie Rowe leapt through them, and her four sisters led all the lads of the street in a fire-dance — a rapid roaring circle around.

Pauline packed the kids off to bed, while Brian saw his father and mother safely snoring between the sheets. He came downstairs, back to Pauline, who sat on the rug by the built-up fire in the hearth. “Feel all right, duck?” she asked.

“Solid,” he said. “I must have had eight pints.”

She took off her cardigan and threw it over the chair. “Do you good. Our dad used to like his beer, I do know that. I’d hate to go out with a lad who didn’t drink.”

“Well, you’ll never be able to grumble at me,” he laughed. “Not that I’m a big boozer, but I like a sup now and again.” Poor old Mullinder — it was too happy a time not to think of him. Into the world and out of it; out of nothing and into nothing, and that was all there was to it, the beginning and the end of it. He stood by the shelf, looking down at her: long unpermed brown hair falling to her shoulders, breasts low and pointing outwards, full and mature, legs turned back under her. She smoked a Park Drive — as though it didn’t belong to her, he thought, or as though she didn’t know it was lit — in short inexperienced draws without bothering to take down, a long pause between each as she stared into the fire. He reached back to switch off the light.

In the yard outside footsteps and calls of good night were loud between the street and back doors. Children’s voices diminished, and because they were put to bed, dogs rested free from torment by fireworks. Someone clattered his way into a lavatory, and after a few minutes dragged the chain down and slouched his boots out again, rattling his gate and calling good night to a neighbour on the way in. Mister Summers, Brian thought, able to recognize every voice no matter how much drink had gone into it. The yard quieted, and the festival of sound left the flickering fire to itself. “Are you all right, duck?” he said tenderly.

“Yes, are you?”

“Yes.” He pushed the chairs back, took cushions from the sofa, and placed them on the rug. “Did you have a good time?”

“I liked it in the pub,” she said. “A bit o’ singing like that does you good, I reckon.”

He sat by her: “It does, an’ all.”

“I ain’t ’ad a night out like that since our Betty got married.” She threw her cigarette into the fire, watched it strip off its paper like a coat as if to dive deeper in. They kissed, and lay down on the rug, and knowing that no one would disturb them that night, he drew skirt and blouse and underwear from her white and passionately waiting body. Her face glowed from the nearness of the blazing fire, and from the unfamiliarity of allowing her nakedness to be seen by him. She drew towards his caresses, a thoughtless process of kissing that, as he undressed, passed into an act of love-making that was slow and marvellous, submerging their closed eyes into a will over which neither thought of having any control. They lay together with no precaution between the final pleasure, into a smooth rhythm of love and a grip of arms to stop them crying out at the climax of it.

They dressed in silence. He went to the back door and stood looking up the yards, suffocating from a deep still-burning fever. He felt a laugh of oversatisfied joy begin in his heart, then caught a full cold draught of the night air, which made him think it was about time he took Pauline home. The smell of ash and burnt paper from dead bonfires drifted in from the street, pointing out how silent were the thousands of houses spreading around. It was a good smell, and he savoured all it would ever mean: spring flames of victory and love. The factory dynamos still filled the air with their omnipresent low drone, so all-pervading that unless they were brought to mind by an act of imagination, the noise would go unnoticed. The factory hadn’t shut down its row! Not for a minute. On it went, through booze-ups and victory fires, never stopping. Work, more than anything, was something good, hitched on to the slow grinding chariot wheels of life that never ceased.

Pauline came to his side, coat on and ready to be walked home. She hadn’t once mentioned that her mother would be mad at her having stopped out half the night. Not that either of them thought it mattered any more. They walked up the street arm-in-arm, through many streets, passing deflated bonfires, from some of which a red eye still glowed, potent and hiding its colours. A few months later, victory fires would burn again, red posters in every window, red streamers waving from every child’s hand, red in the real victory for which the people had waited like the glowing eyes of the bonfires.

CHAPTER 25

He closed the doors early, shutting out the unquestionable superiority of insect life, and the red-soaked sky at dusk that filtered away to blue scrub and forest and a runaway flattened to cold sleep. He spun the goniometer like a roulette wheel and it stopped at east, the opposite direction he wanted to take. No aircraft fenced the atomospherics with its morse, and he slouched in the basket-chair, bored and tired, tense at the thought of a dozen empty hours before daylight and relief. It wasn’t possible any more to take an occasional potshot at shadows with the rifle, for together with fifty pounds of ammo it had been recalled to the armoury so that if bandits attacked the hut (still the farthest outpost of camp and airstrip) they couldn’t capture the wherewithal to knock off a few planters or swaddies. They’ll kill me, but as long as they don’t get the rifle, that’s all that matters. The old man would laugh if he knew I was in such a fix: What did I tell you then, eh? Don’t join up, I said, didn’t I? And what do you do? You join up, don’t yer? If you get shot it’ll serve you right. Don’t come crying to me with your head in your hands, you bleddy numbskull. That’s how he’d carry on, and he’d be dead-right as well. Still, there are fifty-odd rounds the amoury’ll never get back, which I’m holding for when the Communists come up and say: “Stand and deliver: your bullets or your life.” And if they mow me down first, they’ll be plain enough to find by anyone good at looting. I suppose the old man would say I was daft for climbing Gunong Barat, but there I’d argue, because even though we didn’t get to the top I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I weighed a solid hundred and fifty when I went up but only a hundred and thirty now, and no matter how much I scoff (and I feel clambed all the time), I can’t put it back on. So it cost twenty pounds of flesh to find out that Gunong Barat wasn’t worth a light.

He saw Mimi the same evening he got back, not having thought of her once during the trip. Both spoke little, moved quickly and blindly into love on her narrow bed. Shuddering at the orgasm, he roared like an animal, the jungle bursting out of his soul. It was as though, in this first night asleep, shrubbery entangled itself in his brain, branches and leaves worked their way to the back of his eyes. He burned in a fever, as if next to a fire, plunged like burning iron into a bath of warm water. After the hard earth of the forest, it was difficult to sleep. She woke him at midnight: they talked and made love, and he finally slept as if he had no life left.

He walked a few yards out for a piss, into a night still and warm, as if the sky had stopped breathing, it had so many stars around. Anybody hiding in the grass could shoot me while I shake the drops off: the thought turned sweat-cold on his back, though he didn’t hurry to get inside. And just imagine, he don’t know I’m really a friend who’d go into the jungle and help him if he came up and asked me to. All I’d feel is a hot thump at the back of my neck and the next second I’d be dead, listening to the old man say: I told you so.

I could be back in Nottingham earning ten quid a week at the Raleigh instead of wasting time in this hot district, fighting my pals. He fastened the door and listened-out at the set: nothing doing. But on day watches a dozen four-engined bombers were up patrolling the mountain jungle, wanting DF bearings as fast as they could be sent. It got so hot at times that the relieving operator had to jump into the chair and take over sending without a hello or goodbye.

Rifle or not, the first burst of bullets would rip through the hut and write LONG LIVE STALIN on my bony chest. I wouldn’t even have time to rush outside with my hands up and shout: “Don’t fire, comrades. It’s me — Brian. I used to listen to your pals spouting outside the Raleigh only a couple of years back, and I used to buy all their pamphlets and ruin my eyes reading ’em.” His hollow laugh ran round the hut and came chewed up back to him. Why did I let myself get into this? I could have deserted or gone to clink like Colin and Dave. I told Knotman: “I don’t want to do anything against the Communists.”

“You won’t have much choice,” he told me back.

“Maybe I will have. Something might turn up that I can help them with.”

“Don’t be crazy and rush into anything you might regret,” Knotman said, taking another pull at his pint of Tiger. “This whole system will go rotten of its own accord without you risking your neck. It doesn’t matter whether the Communists win or lose in Malaya: they’ll get the whole world sooner or later, peacefully as well. It might not happen in your lifetime, but as Bill Shakespeare said, it’s bound to some day. Too bloody right it will. Let’s drink to it.”

He set a fire going outside, long wood-smelling flames jumping into the darkness like assegais, swallowing the black kettle resting on a crude arrangement of stones. The fire made a circle of light, the darkness a prison into which he couldn’t walk. He realized how illuminated he was against the lit-up backdrop of the hut should some Communist happen to be reconnoitring. A stream of bullets aimed at his silhouetted stick-like figure would finish him off, and bang would be gone the rest of his sweet life with Pauline and the kid: all memories destroyed and expectations nullified; present tiredness, boredom, boots warmed by the flames, his sleepless rimless eyes, obliterated.

Long-range annihilation, a decoy to sponge up bullets. Around the hut was a tin-henge circle, a radius of petrol cans threaded by a piece of invisible string, so that anyone creeping in the darkness would send a resonant warning clatter against stony ground. Should this happen, Brian saw himself switching off lights and dashing into the elephant grass, gripping a rusty bayonet, where he’d stick it out while the hut was ransacked for ammunition or maybe spare wireless parts — though he found it hard to imagine himself not being shot at and killed before witnessing this dramatic scene of plunder.

Mechanics at the transmitter compound had electrified the wire fence and rigged the fire extinguishers with sulphuric acid. Perhaps they’ll get the orderly officer and a couple of sergeants by mistake, because, as Knotman says: “It’s them who shout ‘Charge’ and ‘Up and at ’em, lads’ who are your biggest enemies.”

Guards at the camp had been doubled and armed with rifles — instead of a pencil and book to note anyone coming back late from a good time. Several companies of Malayan Police patrolled the area. A few nights ago two of them ventured as far as the hut and knocked at the door, so he mashed some tea and set them a couple of mattresses on the floor for an hour’s kip, feeling sorry at their boring walkabout in the jungle darkness. Brian stayed awake at the set, to rouse them at dawn and send them back to camp. He remembered also how the same pair had been drummed out of the Malayan Police a week later for being found asleep near the transmitter compound: they walked from the camp after the court martial, dressed again in saris and trilby hats, laughing gaily while lugging cheap suitcases towards the station. If only it could happen to me.

Barbed-wire fences were repaired and patrolled, and road-blocks between ferry and airstrip manned by Malayan and planter volunteers toting clubs and shotguns. The Communists issued an ultimatum that all Europeans in Malaya were to scat within a month, and most of the signals billet wished it could be accepted. Brian was all for it, but Baker replied, calm and studious in such circumstances, that Chinese communists were causing all the trouble, and that if anyone should rule Malaya it should be the Malays. They were already a long way to getting self-government anyway, though of course the Chinese would have to have a hand in it because they outnumbered other races in the peninsula and were the brains of the country. The Chinese Communists, Baker went on, reacting as expected to the emergency, were a small minority who wanted to get rid of the British and set up their own dictatorship. If you believe in democracy you’ve got to do what you can to put down these terrorists.

“You’ve been reading the wrong newspapers,” Brian told him.

“You haven’t been reading any at all,” Baker said.

The kettle boiled, and the ritual mashing and drinking of tea passed a bemused hour. He ate bread and sardines, flipped through a Saturday Evening Post, unable to read any of the stories. Dry-mouthed atmospherics crashed so loud out of the earphones that he wouldn’t have heard a tank roaring by, never mind the feeble warning of a tin falling on stone. “I can’t wait to get back to you,” he wrote to Pauline. “I’ve finished with this joint, even though I did like it at first. I know when I’ve had enough. In a way, I volunteered to come out here, because I’m sure I could have stayed all my time out in England if I’d put in for it. But even though it’s been murder being away from you all this time, I’m still glad I came.” He was going to scrap that paragraph, but left it and went on: “I feel good at the moment. I wish you was here with me now, though. I don’t need to tell you what I’d do to you, and I bet you can guess anyway. It’s stark wicked not being able to be near you.” He paused to chase a spider that winged across the table — red diamond among hairy legs — which he cornered and flattened with a one-pound hammer after it tipped itself in a suicide dive to the floor. It could have bitten me to death: I won’t get back to England if I’m not careful. “Still, it’s only six weeks now, sweetheart, and I’ll be on the boat coming home to you. So keep well for me, and look after the young ’un with a few kisses from me. We’ll have a smashing time.” The envelope was marked with reciprocating cyphers: BURMA; ITALY; SWALK: Be Undressed and Ready, My Angel; I Trust And Love You; Sealed With A Loving Kiss.

By one, he felt his bones melting, senses falling to death. Sending his call-sign to all stations brought no answer, so he spread a mattress over the table and heaved himself on to it, cradled away in seconds to a disintegration of sleep. A metallic hand drew his consciousness together, turned it into a punchbag, and was battering at the fibres of his exhaustion. It began softly and was tolerated, then became like the banging of a drum that he was locked in, increased till it woke him, startled and enraged. He mustered a big voice: “Who’s that?”

His heart bumped and trembled. My number’s up, though they didn’t shoot first, so maybe I can argue, give a few air-force secrets away. He looked for something he might use as a weapon. “Who’s that?” he called again.

He picked up the hammer and swung open the door. Light blinded him and he saw nothing. Then he made out an officer and a sergeant, and slid his hammer back to the table. “I didn’t hear you come up,” he said, observing the dark shadow of a jeep by the aerials. “I was working on the set.”

They looked around. The NCO, a sawn-off little bastard with a mug like Al Capone, carried a Sten: “Orderly officer,” he barked, as if expecting him to jump to attention and throw a well-ironed ceremonial uniform over his bare chest, oil-stained shorts, and unlaced slippers.

“Are you the only one here?” the orderly officer said. He was a flying-control officer, an enormous red-haired Jew of thirty-odd, more like Goliath than David, with the stature of the proverbial village blacksmith. Brian nodded. “What are all them tins doing around the hut?” the sergeant demanded. “I nearly broke my shins on ’em.”

“What tins?” Brian asked, reverting from an intelligent wireless operator to a Radford lout. The orderly officer glanced at his wireless set: “Any kites around?”

“Not tonight,” Brian said, adding “sir” when Al Capone gave him a dirty look. “Where’s your rifle?”

“I haven’t got one, sir. They called ’em in from out-stations in case the bandits should get in and take ’em.”

“I don’t suppose you feel very good about that,” the orderly officer said sympathetically.

“I don’t mind.”

“Why do you keep the doors closed and locked?” Al Capone said.

“To keep insects out.”

“Gets a bit stuffy, don’t it?” Brian kept quiet, while Capone looked the place over as if it were a pigsty he’d stumbled into instead of a brothel. “Are you all right out here then?” the orderly officer asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Telephone in order?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rations sufficient from the cookhouse?”

“Yes, sir. Fine.”

“What did they give you?” He told him: half a tin of milk, some sugar, tea, a loaf, and a tin of sardines.

“Enough?”

“Plenty, sir.”

He turned to go: “If you want anything, phone me at the control tower. I’ll be there for the night.”

Brian watched them drive off. It was the first time an orderly officer had thought to call that far from the bar at the officers’ mess. Maybe they are bothered whether I get shot after all. Tiredness rushed back, ached into his eyes like creosote. I don’t care if all the Communists of the world are creeping up on my hut to burn it to the ground, or if all the kites above Malaya are getting sore throats sending SOS’s: I’m dead-beat. He lowered the volume of the receiver, stretched out on the bed, and fell into a deep sleep till daylight.

He read every newspaper from front page to last, hoping to discover how the “war” was progressing. A so-called “state of emergency” brought in martial law, and he noted with some confusion the fact that he was part of it. Because others in the camp were also mixed up, a civilian education officer came from Singapore to give a lecture on the political situation. He was a thin, dried-out man of middle-age wearing an immaculate flower-blue shirt and beige trousers, a deliberate touch of informality that would endear him more to his khaki-drilled audience. The same talk, called “British Achievements in Malaya,” had been given at every camp along the line, so by the time he reached Kota Libis he was practised and adept in his delivery, the marked set of his jaw and his steel-blue eyes somehow dividing his personality between severity on the one hand, and final disbelief in his own words on the other. Even if what he said didn’t seem convincing to himself, he was a gifted enough speaker to make it appear so to the more simple of his listeners. The NAAFI canteen was filled with those who had come to hear him spout on the official view of the Malayan rebellion, and after the station adjutant had spoken a few words by way of introduction, the first twenty minutes of his address were an account of how the British had acquired Malaya, how they had rid it of disease and laid a superlative system of communication, pushed back the ravaging waves of the jungle and brought rubber into the country. He then came to the present day:

“War was declared, in a manner of speaking,” he said, “on June 15th. An emergency meeting of a hundred Perak rubber-estate managers took place at Ipoh, and it was decided then and there to ask Sir Edward Ghent (the High Commissioner, as you all know) to declare a state of emergency because of widespread outbreaks of lawlessness. For this lawlessness the planters blamed the weakness of civil government, as well as Communist political agitators, who were also behind the murders that were beginning to sweep the rest of the peninsula.

“It was about this time that the Cornish manager of a tin mine near Ipoh was shot dead while paying his employees, and robbed of two thousand four hundred dollars.” [“And ten thousand people starved that month,” someone near Brian said.] “The Straits Times also reported that three British rubber planters were murdered near Ipoh. They were captured by Chinese Communists armed with Sten guns, tied to chairs, and riddled with bullets. All European families were ordered to evacuate the area at once, though only a few would do so. A law was passed securing capital punishment for illegal possession of firearms” [It’s like a law being passed in 1939 making it criminal for the Jerries to have guns, Brian thought] “a law which, while necessary from a legal point of view, made little if any difference to the gathering wave of war coming out of the jungle. In such a country as this a few thousand men, resourceful and determined, can hold out for a long time, inflicting far more damage and casualties than they would sustain themselves, at first. Reinforcements come in constantly from South China, moving by secret jungle routes through Indo-China and Siam. British subjects in Malaya are now living under hard and dangerous conditions. Their bungalows — as most of you may well know — are turned into miniature fortresses, outposts on the edge of the jungle, guarded day and night, surrounded with barbed wire and sandbags. The planters carry on their work armed with rifles and sub-machine-guns, and these men and their families are showing the usual British obduracy under such difficult circumstances, an obduracy always unexpected by their enemies. The Communists had hoped for a concerted rush for the boats at Penang and Singapore, but they were disappointed.

“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 was 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.

CHAPTER 26

On his first leave from square-bashing, Brian had got into Nottingham at eight of an evening, having taken most of the day to travel from the back-end of Gloucestershire. Reaching the wide green flatlands of the Trent beyond Brum, he felt so much excitement that he couldn’t eat the sandwiches and cake dashed out for at the last stop. Cows were dotted by peaceful and diminished streams and sunlight still burned into the packed corridor, and he felt himself being channelled nearer to Nottingham with every circling clatter of the wheels. The excitement in him was not so much at seeing Pauline as at the sensation in his stomach of being lost once more in the vast familiar spider’s web of Nottingham and all the comfortable meaning of it.

After a hello cup of tea with mam and dad in Radford, he hopped a couple of buses to see Pauline on the estate out at Aspley. Perhaps by some fluke the house would be empty and they’d be able to love each other on the settee or roll about in one of the made beds upstairs; or if not that, then happen they could go for a walk beyond the Broad Oak and snug down in some dry field of sweet summer grasses.

Everybody was in, at supper, as if they’d been waiting especially to greet him after his first ten weeks drilling like a brainless ragbag for his king and country. You never got what you hoped for, so he might have known it would be like this. Mrs. Mullinder poured him tea in the pint-sized mug that used to be old Mullinder’s favourite — a gesture indicating that Brian was already part of the tribal loot. Fourteen-year-old Maureen sat reading Oracle by the fire, all self-conscious with her small high bosom and trace of lipstick, her face the spit-image of Pauline’s when he’d started courting her at fifteen. They’re a good-looking family, he thought, though feeling uneasy at the mother’s gaze and the comparative silence in spite of the fact that there were five people in the room. “You look a bit as if you’ve had a hard time in the air force,” Betty said with a sly grin. “Do you get good grub?”

“Not bad. Sometimes it’s pigswill, though.” Pauline didn’t say much either, face half-hidden by the hair as she opened a tin of fruit on the other side of the table. However, he was too involved eating his way through the still-lavish supper to let the atmosphere disturb him. Not that he expected them to put the flags out.

Afterwards he suggested a walk. “You’d better tell him while you’ve got the chance,” he remembered Mrs. Mullinder saying. “And come to some arrangement.”

She broke it on Coventry Lane: “I’m having a baby.”

They stopped by a gate, leaned on it so that he could take the shock. Even going into the air force hadn’t wrenched the nuts-and-bolts of his world as loose as this piece of information. The picture of his life was shaken, sent spinning like an iron Catherine-wheel in front of his eyes. He closed them tight, knew that this wasn’t the way to take such news, so opened them on green fields rolling up to the tree-trunked bastion of Catstone Wood, a mist-green spear-blade of sky above, which, he realized through his shock, was coloured by the sun going down. “Roll on,” he muttered with a long-drawn-out whistle of breath. “This is a stunner.”

“That’s nowt to what I said when I found out, I can tell you,” she retorted, pale and firm-lipped. She was half a stranger after ten weeks’ absence, and he felt this wasn’t a good way to get to know her again. He remembered how Joan and Jim had got married: it began a mere three months ago by Joan telling Jim that she was pregnant, and by the time she was able to say it was a false alarm, they were engaged and didn’t think it worth the fuss and bother to put off the tentative wedding-date already fixed. Jim told Brian at the time that being engaged made people look up to you, treat you with more respect, like an adult at last. But Brian didn’t feel he needed that sort of respect, though he wondered whether Pauline had taken a tip from Joan and was only saying she was pregnant to get him on the tramline to matrimony.

“Mam caught me being sick one morning and I said I had a bilious bout, but when it went on for a week she made me go to the doctor’s with her. I already knew, though, in a way, because I’d missed a period. I kept hoping it wasn’t true, that’s all.” She smiled, and he saw she wasn’t concerned — like Joan had plainly been — to trick him into an engagement.

“It’s a sod, i’n’t it?” he said, half-smiling back. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, was gripped by a hot-aches of the heart and brain.

“It is, if you look at it in that way,” she answered. They walked arm-in-arm along the blue-blackness of the lane, a cold wind blowing into their faces. His next statement came almost without thought — at least, he had wondered whether or not to say it, and decided he would before too much consideration stopped him: “We’ll think about getting married.”

“Do you want to?” she asked, in a dead-level inconsequential voice. He squeezed her arm: “I do, if you want to know. If you’ll ’ave me, that is.”

She laughed: “Maybe it’s a case of having to!”

“We’ve been going out with each other long enough.”

“In a way, though, I’m sorry it had to be a bit of a force-put. I don’t like having to, if you see what I mean.”

He was offended. “Why not then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It would have been better the other way.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Not that I want to get married in church or anything like that,” she said. “It’s old-fashioned now. As long as you’re married, what does it matter?”

“That’s a good job,” he agreed, “though I don’t expect it’ll make your mam and Betty very happy.”

“Well, it’s us that matter, duck, i’n’t it? Not many people bother wi’ church nowadays.”

“They don’t,” he said. “We should be in the Broad Oak knocking it back now, celebrating. It’s supposed to be good when two people get engaged.” He was fighting away from the part of himself that felt bear-trapped, leg-caught, and pulled into the earth-pits of responsibility.

“I’d love to have a drink, but I can’t face it just now.”

“Neither can I, in a way”—glad that she also felt the same mixed sensation of it all.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Though I don’t see the need for much hurry.”

“Well, we can’t dawdle either, can we?”

“I’ll see to everything, don’t worry. Get special leave and all that.”

“As long as you aren’t backing out,” she said, a half-serious caution to see how he’d take it.

“I would if I wanted to,” he said firmly. “But I won’t want to. I love you too much, you know that.”

“As long as I know,” she taunted.

“Well, I’ve told you,” he cried. “I’ve been telling you for a long time.”

“I know you have, duck.”

“You never look as though you believe me, though.”

“What do you expect? We both go as far as we can”—this reference to the just-revealed fact that she was having a baby quieted his shock, and he held her close: “Don’t let’s get mad, love.”

“I’ve been worrying myself blind these last three weeks. Mam’s been on to me as well.”

“Why didn’t you write and tell me?” he shouted in the darkness. “I’d a been out o’ that camp like a shot. Nobody could have stopped me.”

“Well, I don’t know. I thought it wouldn’t be the best thing, to write and tell you it in a letter. Mam said so as well when I told her.”

“You thought I’d run away and never show my face?” he laughed.

Her hard knuckles thumped into his ribs: “No, you leary swine. But you can clear off now if you want to, because I can soon have the baby and keep it myself without your ’elp. In fact, that’s what mam said. ‘Don’t get married if you don’t like him. But if you can, it’d be better.’ So I don’t care how much trouble it is, it ain’t that much of a force-put. I didn’t want to get married as early as this, no more than yo’ did. So I’m not going to marry you just because I’m having a baby. I can allus live at home and stay at work.”

He rubbed the pain out of his bones: her outbursts were the more abrupt and fiery in proportion to her at-times angelic calmness. “You want to keep your temper. I was only having a joke.”

“All right,” she said, “but you ought to be nice to me sometimes.”

“I often am”—he tried to hit off the correct ratio of his good nature — “but I come home on leave, rush straight to see you all the way from Gloucestershire, and this is what you meet me with. You think it i’n’t a shock for me as well?”

“I know it is, but I couldn’t break it any other way, could I? I’m glad you’ve come, though. It feels better for me now.”

They drew into a long kiss by the hedge, stopped only when a car drove by and fixed them in its headlights before turning off at the Balloon Houses. “I don’t feel bad about having a baby,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll like it, and that it’ll be all right.”

“It sounds O.K. to me. I suppose we let ourselves in for it.” He was filled with joy and dread. The first shock had shown the future as a confused black ocean, which had lost much of its alarm, however, in the last half hour because a feeling of having gained some enormous happiness had gradually come into him. They crossed the main road, arms locked around each other, and walked into a wood on the far side.

The day before Brian was due back in Gloucestershire Bert swung up in the yard, resplendent in beret and battle-dress and a couple of campaign ribbons won from the last push over the Rhine. He was quartered in Trieste and had travelled across Europe on a forty-hour journey of wooden seats to get himself — so he joked to Harold Seaton — an earful of Radford, a gutful of Shippoe’s, and an armful of fat tart.

They went out to walk part of the way together: Brian to see Pauline at Aspley, Bert to call on his brother at nearby Cinderhill. It was a dry, baking summer, seemingly endless because it had been on almost a week, and they swapped opinions on life in uniform, Brian disliking his incarceration mainly for a reason as yet unspoken to Bert, and Bert enjoying his experience because he had a marvellous time not having to worry where the next meal or shilling came from. “I might even sign on an extra three years,” he said, “instead of coming out at Christmas. In fact, I’m sure I shall.”

“What do you want to do that for?” Brian asked. “There’s plenty o’ wok.”

“I like it better than wok,” Bert told him.

Over a sandstone wall lay a cemetery, cool grass waving and flowers spread on many graves, colours of snow and blood and mustard against marble. It was Sunday morning, and some people tended stones and urns, busying themselves with hedge-clippers and watering-cans. Brian said to his cousin: “I’m signing on as well in a way, only for life. I’m getting married.”

Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: “You’re not.”

“I am. To Pauline. Don’t you think we’ve been courting long enough?”

“Come off it.”

“What do you mean, come off it?” He wanted more reaction than this, so little not indicating whether Bert thought him a fool or a grown-up, a madcap or a restless layabout who was getting spliced for want of anything new to do, or a shade of every reason. But he underestimated Bert, who looked at him slyly, shut one eye, and demanded: “She’s having a kid?”—at the same time offering a fag from a ten-pack to mollify such outrightness in case he was wide of the mark.

Brian’s first thought was to say no, she bloody-well wasn’t, but who knew how much it would show by the time they were able to get married? And in any case, when she had the kid it would be calculated in simple-finger arithmetic (digit by digit backdated), so that it was better to be thought trapped now than be seen to have been a frightened liar then.

“She’s pregnant,” he said, “and we’re getting married.”

They walked on, out of step now and Bert looking in at him as if to find a trace of lying on his face. “But you’ll be done for,” he raved suddenly. “You’ll be hooked, finished, skewered and knackered. Why don’t you do a bunk?”

“Because I don’t want to. I’d never be able to see her again.”

“Come off it. Sign on, get sent overseas, cut your throat, hang yourself. For Christ’s sake, you’re only eighteen.”

“I’ll be nineteen next year,” he grinned. Bert was grieved: “I know, sure, Brian. You’ll be twenty-one soon as well, and we’ll give you the key to the bleeding door: can’t you wait even that long? It’s batchy to get married at eighteen. Think of all the fun you can still have. Running after all the women your eyes hook on to. I know it wain’t suit yo’ to get married, I do an’ all. You ain’t that sort. You’re too much of a sod, like I am.”

“I know,” Brian said, “but I love her, you see. You think I’m trapped just because she’s having a kid? Well, what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. If I didn’t love her, I might think twice about it.”

“You’ve got to think twenty times about whether you love a tart or not.” Brian had thought a hundred times, and knew his mind by now on that subject anyway. Pauline was having a baby, and because he loved her they were going to get married. There was no need to ask himself what he would have done if he hadn’t loved her, if she’d been little more than a casual acquaintance. “What’s made you get sloppy all of a sudden?” Bert demanded.

He turned on him, fists clenched and ready to be raised: “I’m not bloody-well sloppy, so don’t come it. I’m just doing what I want to do and what I think is right, and I’m not asking yo’ whether it’s good for me or not, because I know it is because I want it.”

“Well,” Bert said, “if that’s the way you feel. All right, all right. Let me be best man, then.” They shook on it and Bert seemed to think it a good idea Brian was getting married by the time they got around to changing the subject.

The cornfield was being subtly reduced in size. A combine-harvester came towards them, went on by, and passed before they were halfway across on their slow walk. The area of high corn seemed no smaller than before, and already the machine was a red beetle turning again towards the far side of the sloping field, its engine noise filling the autumn evening like the leisured omnipresent growling of an invisible mastodon. A few bristles of withered corn lay over the path, like heads at which the big chop of the machine had suffered disappointment.

He reached for her hand as they ambled towards the shrub-covered hillside, a rising gradient of amber and bracken. He frowned with concern at her slight limp: “Does your foot still hurt, love?”

“It aches across the top.”

“We wain’t walk far, then,” he promised, squeezing her hand tighter, hoping her foot would stop hurting if they ceased to think about it. He fastened the polished buttons of his overcoat, smiled at her long brown hair tied by a piece of ribbon, and noticed the strength in her calm smooth face, her pouting lips, shining forehead — a face resting for the moment from make-up because she had said: “You don’t mind me letting my hair down now and again, do you?” Not that she had ever been much addicted to the alchemy of powders and lipsticks. The fresh smell of mown corn sharpened his regret that this would be their last night together for a few months, and he smiled to hide his anguish: “I suppose we should make the best of this evening.”

She pressed his hand: “It worn’t a very long leave, wor it?”

“Long enough to get married in.”

It was an’ all.

“You don’t regret it, do you?” A tractor passed slowly, pulling a dray loaded with the systematic droppings of the combine-harvester. The young driver had a sleeve of his shirt torn, and a farmhand on top of the sacks smiled as they passed.

“We’re young, so everybody told me at work. But I think it best to get married young.”

“So do I,” he laughed. “More time for being in bed together.” They’d been married two weeks ago, both families (and the friends of both) crowding the vestibule of the down-town registrar, and packing into the Trafalgar later for a noisy reception.

“Have you enjoyed this fortnight?”

She detected in his voice a sickness at heart simply because he was trying to hide it, at a time when they could hide nothing from each other. “It’s been marvellous,” she answered. Her stomach was beginning to show, a slight pushing from under her voluminous coat.

“I’ll be in Birmingham this time tomorrow, on my way back.”

“I wish I was going with you. It’s not very nice being left behind.”

“I know. I shan’t enjoy it either.” She asked why not, knowing the answer, yet still wanting to hear it. “Because you won’t be with me,” he told her. “I often think of packing the air force in. Walking out. They’d never find me. We could live in another town.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “You’ve only got two years to do. It’ll be all over then.”

“I might have to go abroad.”

“But you’ll soon be back.” He wondered how she could say these things with such an expression of surety, see two years as being but a feminine small wisdom-tooth of time, a nothing that to him looked like a vast ocean with no opposite shore visible. Her love must be deeper than mine, calm and everlasting, if this seems such a normal hurdle to get over before our proper lives start.

But she’ll have something to keep her company while I’m away. “Shall we go along here?”—pointing to where the footpath forked, through a meadow and up a hill.

“To the left,” he said, not knowing why. Walking before him, she hummed a tune. There was a low, grass-covered bank on one side and blackberry bushes on the other. The sound of birds and the combine-harvester working below was hardly noticed now, and the sun, soon to fall behind the hill, lay a pale yellow light over the fields. A breeze carried white fluff from seedpods of rose-bay, some settling on to his grey uniform.

“You’ll be a snowman in a bit,” she said, finding it easy to laugh this evening.

“You’ll be a snowmaiden as well,” he cried, her coat spotted white.

“Tell me another. I’m a married woman now!” She stopped by a bush: “What are these blue flowers called?”

“I don’t know,” he teased.

“Yes, you do. You should, anyway. You’re the one who’s allus telling me about living all that time in the country at your grandma’s when you was a kid.”

He knelt to look: “Harebells, I think.”

“I thought they came in April?” she said.

“Bluebells do, but these don’t. Where did you go to school?” Three blue heads hung half-concealed under the low leaves of a bush before some ferns. “Faith, Hope, and Charity’s what they look like,” she pronounced, brushing her fingers across them.

“And Hope stays still,” he said, when one didn’t move.

She touched it, made it sway with the others: “Easy, you see.” They sat on the bank and she emptied soil from her shoes. “I don’t want to go home tonight, do you?”

“It’d be nippy,” he said, “kipping out in the fields. It’s nearly October. You’ll be better off in bed wi’ me, duck.”

“You’re allus on about that,” she cried. “We shouldn’t do it so much now I’m pregnant.”

“Hark at who’s talking!” He laughed, walked to a bush and picked a cluster of blackberries, then went to another until he had gathered a handful. “What are you doing?” she called out, unable to see. He came back: “Open your mouth.”

“What for?” She picked the juiciest to eat, until a pang of conscience showed in her eyes, and made her feed him some. “I had a few already, when I was collecting ’em.” Hands empty, they looked at the vulnerable tenderness behind each other’s eyes: “Why have I got to go off tomorrow? It’s useless and crazy.” She couldn’t reply, but held him and took his kisses.

They walked on, becoming more and more white from rose-bay. It even settled on the blackberries, had to blown off before they could eat them. They found raspberries also, and pink juice ran like blood to his hands: when they kissed he joked about tasting raspberry flavour: “I thought it was your lipstick,” he said, taking her arm so that she faced him. He saw the tremor of her mouth and they kissed passionately. “I love you,” she said. “Darling Brian, I I love you”—almost inaudibly. “I love you, sweetheart”—such committing words no longer unreal or out of place, not scoffed at as they might have been, had either used them a while back. He supposed such words were only embarrassing when the meaning of them had been forgotten or wasn’t known; when spoken with reason, their sounds were as intense and sexual as the kisses that flowered at the same time.

Voices along the path made them stand apart. “Let’s walk on up the hill,” he said, nodding to show the direction. “There’s plenty of bushes where we wain’t be seen.” She hesitated. “It’ll be all right.”

They threaded a way up through brambles, Brian in front when the path narrowed. Pauline seemed happier now, humming softly, dignified in her walk, as if heavier than she yet was. The fortnight since getting married had been spent at Pauline’s: he lived there as one of the family, and their room overlooked the back garden. Their names were down on the council housing list, but nothing would be ready, they realized, until years after he’d come out of the air force. So on his demob they planned to get rooms down town so as to be on their own.

“We’ll sit here.” He spread his overcoat and took off his tunic.

“Don’t get a cold, duck, will you?”

“It ain’t winter yet,” he said, embarrassed that she should show concern that he would hardly have noticed before they were married.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want you to catch cold.”

He put his hand on her stomach: “You want to worry about that little bogger in there, not me.”

“He’s warm enough,” she said. They lay with arms around each other. He raised his head, saw a man walking along the footpath below, and wondered whether he could see them. “What’s up, duck?”

“Nothing”—bending again to kiss her. I’ll be off tomorrow — a fact that kept hammering at him, wouldn’t let him live out the last few hours with her in peace. It had been in his mind all day, and now they lay silently together it became more painful. Back to prison. I’m free now: I should just piss off and desert. It’d be a few days before they missed me. I wain’t see her for another three months, studying my guts out at radio school to be jumped-up wireless operator. It’s a wonder I passed the aptitude tests for it. His hand touched her swollen breasts and he kissed each of her closed eyelids: the whole of her vision, all that she had seen and would ever see, was beating in the delicate hump under the thin white lids of flesh. And completely in her is a kid I can’t bear to leave as well. We ought to make the most of these few hours — but he couldn’t speak. There’s a time when you can’t do much but talk, and then there’s a time when you can’t do anything but kiss; and the trouble is that you’ve got no bleeding say as to when it will be.

She clung to him: he’ll be off tomorrow, and the fact tormented her, keeping her close to tears the more she thought of it. I shan’t see him for a long while, and she felt afraid of being without him, even though both families looked up to her now and would keep her company. It’s getting dark already, and we’ll have to go soon. “Brian, when do you think your next leave’ll be?”

“Near Christmas.” He raised his head and saw two men walking through the meadow, maybe poachers, though it was hardly dark enough for that, and he was uneasy at the thought that they might be seen. It’d be good to do it out here.

She placed her fingers on his cheek and kissed him. Maybe he will, but I don’t know whether it’ll be all right, though in one way it would be nice, far from people and houses and on our own. He returned the kiss and suddenly there were tears in her throat and she tightened her arms around him. He won’t, she thought, so maybe he doesn’t love me any more.

His arms were cold and he sat up to reach his jacket. A mist was creeping among the far fields, sun descending like a deserter, skulking behind the trees where grey clouds merged. She opened her hand and patted the ground: “It’s damp. You should be more careful.”

He stood. We can’t do it here. “It’s autumn already,” he said. A tree branch swayed nearby and he looked hard but saw nothing, helped her up, thinking maybe it was the prospect of parting that made them such clumsy and hesitant lovers. He lifted his overcoat and put it on. “Look at that mist over there,” she pointed as they walked slowly down. Their attention was caught and suspended by a strange silence. Everything was still and quiet.

“It’s funny,” he said, puzzled by it.

“It’s the harvest machine that’s stopped,” she guessed.

At the foot of the hill they turned for a moment to look into the sun. Why didn’t we? he wondered. It would have been good. The sun was blood-red and misshaped behind the thin trunks of a clump of trees some distance off, and it looked like a premature medal commemorating the winter that was on its way. A sombre crimson light flushed the meadows on either side of the copse.

She wrote once a week, and he worked hard training for his sparks badge, an attainment which would mean more pay and the satisfaction of having a real trade for the first time in his life. Daytime went quickly at class: drawing and describing superheterodyne circuits and transmitter units, studying Ohm’s Law and WT procedure, stepping up week by week to higher speeds of morse practice and teleprinter-operating, to culminate later in out-station exercises. He enjoyed the drawing-in of knowledge and skill, which more than made up for what little parade-ground bullshit there was.

But the long evenings were a yoke that crushed him into a broody silence, so physically strong as he sat by himself in the NAAFI that he grew to feel the resemblance they must have borne to those he had seen his father suffer during the long empty dole days before the war, steeped in vicious bouts of frustrations because he felt he could do nothing about the situation he had let himself fall into. It was a naked agony he couldn’t throw off for weeks after his return from Nottingham. He wrote two letters to Pauline’s one, and was so impatient and disappointed at the inadequacy of hers that he raged and often pulled himself back from screwing them up. But the occasional letter, which was written on impulse and not in answer to one of his, gave out the warm glow of her love in a quickening real sense that his long and thought-out ones rarely achieved. A few words juxtaposed in an unconscious and original way immediately flooded him with the totality of their so-far ecstatic love, drew him right back and painfully into it.

He tried studying, dissected the symbols and diagrams in his notebooks, knowing that if he passed his exams at over sixty per cent he would qualify for more pay, but the pages were too complex to assimilate without further help from an instructor. As the dark frosts of winter came, the unheated billets at night meant sitting permanently in a sub-zero bath of stale air, because for some reason all deliveries of coal to airmen’s billets had ceased. So with a couple of ex-merchant navy roughnecks and an exborstal boy from Glasgow, Brian went on foraging expeditions. They crept silently around with high stockpiles of coal near the well-warmed officers’ quarters, loading sacks and returning black as bandits to set a red fire blazing — to the benefit also of the timid or lazy — in the potbellied stove.

Now and again he went out alone into the white-covered frost fields of a Gloucestershire night and made his way overland to the village, where he threw down a few pints of rough cider and scorched himself by the lavish fire, despite resentful stares from the locals, who felt themselves deprived of its flames by his presence — a mere scab of an airman from the camp which they must have regarded as a blight on the surface of their fair county unless they were tradesmen or shopkeepers. Drank and impervious to the cold, he would weave back to camp, falling like a sack on his bed, to be pulled from sleep next morning by the thick imperative rope of reveille at half-past six.

As Christmas and his next leave approached, he lived with the healthy sound of an express train passing through a station on one of whose platforms he would be waiting. The clean heavy rhythm of its wheels followed him into sleep at night during the last few days, its wheels regular and cleanly solid, evenly beating out a series of V’s, and in the middle of the series, one V coming too quickly on the tail of another and breaking the rhythm slightly — a thrilling and realistic dovetailing of sound. When the end of the train vanished, the noise dragged into a tunnel, and the wind played on the back of his head — because some thoughtless bastard had left the billet window open.

There was a black fog all over the country and the train took five hours to reach Derby. It was crowded, and with a dozen others he found refuge in a luggage wagon, where they spread themselves over sacks, greatcoats tightened in the bitter cold. He reached Nottingham at midnight, a deserted woe-begone station slabbedout on either side of the tracks as he made his loaded way, ticket in teeth, towards the rising steps marked “Exit.”

He took a taxi that purred its swift way through the dead roads of town to Canning Circus, a crest of the tarmac wave then sweeping gently beyond the valley of the Lean and along the wide well-lighted, familiar road to where the Mullinders lived.

His mother-in-law let him in, stood by the stairfoot door saying she’d get straight back to bed because of the cold, and see him in the morning.

“Is Pauline O.K.?” he wanted to know.

“Yes,” she said, clicking the door to and on her way up.

She must have been too fast asleep to hear him rattling at the door, and only woke up while he was undressing. It was a plain room, with yellow walls of orange stippling decorated last by Mullinder in a burst of energy on some long-lost creative weekend, whose memory he had taken to the grave with his bad foot. Apart from the bed, there was a wardrobe, dressing-table, and two chairs, with lino on the floor, and a cupboard in the corner holding Brian’s books. “I didn’t think you’d be in till tomorrow,” she said, when he laid his cold face by her, close in an embrace of kisses. “Get in quick, duck, or you’ll freeze.”

“Why didn’t you have a fire?”

“I didn’t need it,” she said. “It’s warm enough in bed. I filled a hot waterbottle.”

“Well, you wain’t want one any more — not for the next fortnight anyway — because you’ve got me. So sling it out.”

She looked well, an hour of sleep blurring her eyes. “How are you feeling, love?”

“Fine,” she said. “I go to the clinic every week now. I’ve got varicose veins, and the doctor says I’ve got to have something done about them. I’m going to have the baby at home. It should be here in two or three weeks, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it came tomorrow, the way it feels at times.”

“If anything happens while I’m here, I’ll get an extension.”

“I’d like that. That’d be smashing.” He remembered the form that had been passed to all in his class at radio school only a week ago, giving a list of overseas postings and asking for preferences, though not guaranteeing that your choice would be met. The list had so dazzled him during the ten minutes the paper was in his hand (bringing back geography-book memories of fantastic tropical lands and a half-drunken childhood desire to go to them) that he had put an option down for a posting to Japan. He had not filled in the attached application which asked you to state any reason why you might not want to be sent overseas. I’m a nut case, he thought. Maybe I could stay in England, being married and Pauline about to have a kid. But for some unfathomable reason he had left it blank, never knowing what had induced him to do so, neither questioning nor regretting it, except to wonder why he had been sent to Malaya and not Japan.

CHAPTER 27

A couple of fifteen-hundredweight lorries stood by the camp gates, the bursting roar of their engines suggesting that when they finally debouched they would drag the rest of the camp with them. A drop in the noise, and the first one set off at a dangerous speed towards the village, ignored the policeman’s stop-signal at the crossroads, and made for the flat monotonous belt of the Patani swamps.

Before the Dakota was pulled into a belly-dive by some concealed magnet of jungle-soil, its wireless operator had scraped out an SOS — ending his message by the continual buzz of a QTG so that its position was fixed with reasonable accuracy by the wide-awake operators in the DF huts at Kota Libis and Singapore. No message pip-squeaked out of the plane’s emergency set after the crash, so it was uncertain whether anyone had survived. The DF bearings, plotted on Mercator’s North Malaya, crossed on uninhabited terrain of dense forest, between Kedah and Perak.

Brian sat in the first lorry — the wire grid of the earphones chafing his recent haircut — and listened wearily to the crackling of atmospherics, which seemed to be holding boxing-matches on the doorsteps of his eardrums. In some unexplainable way, such noise confined against his ears seemed to blur the distant detail of thin trees and kampong huts set beside the paddy fields on spindly legs. So he put the phones back a little to take in and enjoy the landscape flying by, the wide spaces of hot blue flatlands gently floating in the distance, a sight that made him dread entering the dark forests of the mountains where lurked the dead blood of injured men. The straight road in front, with a ditch and line of thin high trees on either side, looked like a tropically lit version of a Dutch picture he remembered from school a long time ago.

His call-sign crept over in slow morse, preambling a short message giving the position of the army screen moving north from Taiping. He tore off the paper and passed it to Odgeson — who pencilled an acknowledgement for sending back. It seemed like a game, an aptitude test of co-ordination in which groups one and two converge on number three, which has deliberately lost itself in the mountains. He pushed the bakelite from one ear and said: “I expect the bandits are picking up all my morse. It should be coded. Not that I mind: they’re welcome to it.”

Baker lit two fags under cover of his shirt and passed him one: “Don’t worry, the aircrew’s already dead.”

“Dead or not, we’ll have to stay in that jungle till we’ve found ’em. Maybe weeks.” The wind snatched smoke across his face, forced his eyes open. He looked through the cellophane window into the driver’s seat, above which the dashboard needle shivered around sixty. The paddy fields were green, shoots high, lush and cool-looking, unfilled parts reflecting white clouds that hid the blue and green ridges towards which they turned at the next crossroads. The second lorry was a hundred yards behind, and Knotman waved a greeting, clenched his fist in the Communist salute for a lark and a laugh.

So much wind-stream came over the lorry that Brian’s cigarette soon warmed his skin, so he spat it on to the blurred tarmac river of the road. The lorry slowed down and sweat broke from his face, was rubbed dry into his hair. Beyond a village, the undulating and narrow road went through a rubber estate, where a solitary tapper passed, with yoked jerry-cans, from tree to tree like some sober advertisement in one of the trade magazines Brian had often flipped through in the camp library. The manager’s bungalow was fortified with sandbags and barbed wire, and from a rise in the lane a Malayan controlled the approaches with a machine-gun.

Morse. It set up impulses in the brain and got his pencil writing a message from the army platoon to say that their lorry had broken down, and he swore while the last words came through, in the knowledge that such a delay would keep them out longer than necessary. Odgeson gave him a QSL and map reference: “We’ll wait for them there. I hope it won’t be for too long, though.”

“I wish I was on the boat,” he said to Baker, “instead of on this jaunt.”

Baker laughed: “It serves us right for getting mixed up in that Gunong Barat business. I shouldn’t have let you persuade me to go.” His drawn face had lost its inborn English colour and had turned to the first layer of a leathery tan. He’d been on a slow and lonesome booze-up in the NAAFI last night that intensified his usual couldn’t-care-less mood. As the time drew nearer to demob, he drank more and more and took to smoking, while engine manuals and motorbike catalogues lay dusty and forgotten in his locker. “I’d rather be in a brothel,” he said, “than in this four-wheeled oven.”

“You soon will be. Or back in London with your girl. Do you think your motorbike’ll have gone rusty and dropped to bits?”

Being so weary, he took him seriously: “I don’t know, Brian. My brother promised to look after it, so it should be in good enough condition. Not that he’s a very good mechanic, but he keeps his promises.” Odgeson looked up keenly from map to road, his pinkish, oval-shaped face seeming to Brian that it must in some way resemble those of the aircrew they were out to rescue. But the vision of them — college-educated perhaps, certainly skilled to the point of nonchalance and jauntiness — was switched in a second to the foresight of them dead and mangled in the great forks of high, superstrong forest giants. Or maybe wounded, alive and waiting, waiting, being drained of life like a punctured eggtimer.

The lorry was steadier around the curves, with number two only fifty yards behind on the shaded road of the foothills. Brian listened out for other calls from the army, his eyes half-closed at the soporific easygoing purr of the lorry-engine, while Odgeson worked on a time-and-position message for transmission to Kota Libis. They stopped at the occasional roadblock to make a hasty declaration of their mission: “This must be heavy bandit country,” Baker said. “All we need is an ambush at the next turning and the only boat we’ll be on is Noah’s Ark going to heaven.”

Brian called him a pessimist, yet who could be sure, now that Baker had mentioned it? Reports in the Straits Times backed him up; no pitched battle was ever fought, but the Communists picked off isolated police posts, hamlets and estate managers’ bungalows, were marvels at guerilla warfare. Forty miles north of Singapore, he had read, ten of them, wearing jungle-green and armed with Stens, dragged two brothers from a house, shot one dead and left the other so terrified he didn’t get the coppers for a couple of days. Another time at Menkatab, forty attacked a police station, cut the phone wires, and peppered the joint for hours before making off. They really mean business, he thought, and who can blame them?

The sun was well up, the heat a draughtsman drawing islands of sweat on his shirt. Baker mopped himself dry: “Why don’t you put your hat on?” Brian said. “You’ll go down with sunstroke if you aren’t careful.”

“I couldn’t care less,” he retorted. “If I do, maybe they’ll invalid me back to camp, raving my guts off on a shutter — telling them where they can put the tin-pot air force.”

At the next collection of brown huts Odgeson looked at his watch: “We should be there in ten minutes.”

“I wouldn’t need sunstroke to tell ’em that,” Brian said.

“You’d never tell them at all. You wouldn’t know how.”

“Don’t worry: I would.”

“You’re just a sheep like the rest. You’ll go back on the boat, get a job and settle down, and look back on Malaya as the most glorious time of your life.”

“You’ve got me wrong.”

“I’ve seen that album full of photos.”

“So what? I want to show my family what it was like. Anyway, what’s making you so destructive?” Fantastic sugar-lumps of hillocks, sprouting mops of trees with beards of creeper half-covering purple patches of their cliff face, grew back into the hills, reared up two or three hundred feet into a ghostly local and temporary mist that seemed to mask them off as private property. “A hangover,” Baker answered.

“Keep it to yourself then. You can take a turn at these atmospherics in a bit. That’ll get rid of it for you.”

At the next bend of the gravel track, both lorries drew up among the trees. A Malay woman stood in the doorway of a nearby hut and pointed with a smile into the mountainside as they sprang down to flex their legs. Nine rifles were piled by a tree, and the woman came out with a branch of pink bananas that they made up a kitty to buy.

Brian sent a message to Kota Libis saying they had reached the point of rendezvous and were now waiting for the army before lifting themselves into the hills — then handed the set over to Baker. He scouted the shrubbery to amass wood for a tea fire. The flames were obstinate at first, brought smoke from the sap-ends of each stick or drew back from the mossy life of damp pieces, but by absorbed and dexterous application that took him a few minutes away from the worrying reality of his unexpected journey, he succeeded in creating a firm wall of flame. While Odgeson and Knotman were debating how and when to make their next move, he passed around cans of his own black mash.

Looking up, he wondered where the plane lay, for there was no tell-tale indentation, no Siberian meteoric crater or tadpole tail of wreckage to show where it might have stuck its silver snout. A couple of invisible bearings had crossed in the heavy waves of jungle — or were supposed to have, because who could tell how accurate they had been? He was pulled out of his speculations by the sound of an old Ford car — the original, it looked like — put-putting to a halt by the hut. A Malay police officer, dapper and smart in clean khaki, got down and asked Odgeson what he intended to do. Odgeson said his idea was to set off as soon as possible and look for the plane. The police officer smiled brilliantly and replied that, yes, a plane had crashed up there — pointing into the jungle with his rattan — because people in the village had heard it during the night. Of course, he added, no one could guarantee there weren’t bandits in the area. “We won’t be able to hang around much longer, though,” Odgeson said. The police officer agreed that it might not be wise to wait too long, though they should be careful not to take too many risks. With a final smile of approval at the way the world was run, he got into his car and drove off, accompanied by his saried attendant, who toted a machine-gun. The car rattled down the road, shook hands with a corner, and was out of sight.

Brian swilled his can in the stream and stamped on the fire, and the Malay woman stacked his surplus wood by her hut as if sensing they would leave before another round of tea was called for; but Odgeson and Knotman, conferring by the lorries, were a picture of stalemate: no word had come from the army, and they had been waiting more than an hour. Knotman suggested humping it with a couple of others into the mountain, but Odgeson still thought it better to wait till the army came.

“It’s about time somebody went up there, though,” Brian said to Baker as they stood by the radio. “We’ve got rifles, and we’re experienced jungle-bashers. I don’t like to think of them poor bastards snuffing it one by one.” He flipped through his paybook: “Here, I’ve still got your will you gen me at Gunong Barat. You’d better tek it, because if I get up there and want to mash some tea, I might get a fire going with it.” Baker accepted, absent-mindedly set it under the wireless, safe from wind and rain. The others were restless, scuffled with a mess-tin: “I’m Arsenal,” one cried. “I’m Piccadilly Hotspurs,” called another. Baker clicked out the army call sign, but was unanswered, as if no ethereal dots and dashes could penetrate the isolating tree-glutted mountains that ranged three quarters around.

Odgeson decided to act: “Get your rifles. We’ll make two parties, four in each. The drivers can stay with the lorries.” Knotman opened the map to discuss routes and times of meeting. “I don’t like the idea of only me and my mate being left here,” a driver said morosely.

“Neither do we like the idea of going up there,” he was told. Baker received a long-awaited message from the army: they’d been ambushed a few miles south and their lorry was out of action. However, they’d split forces and a couple of sections were coming up on foot. So the drivers were satisfied, and the rest didn’t mind going into the jungle with the army so close. A king-sized Dakota flew north-east across the vast sea of sky, then reappeared at a lower height. It circled twice, went into a dip behind the mountains, and roared down over them from the peak, preceded by a wavering belly-shadow. “He’s in on it, too,” Knotman said. “It’ll be a big do by the look of it, though they’d have done better sending an Auster or a helicopter.” Brian was part of Odgeson’s patrol, Baker and Cheshire, a teleprinter operator, making up the four of them.

Both groups took to a track bordered by waving blades of elephant grass, pliable as bayonets, which soon drew them from each other’s sight. Brian shared a walkie-talkie with Baker, also lugging a rifle and fifty rounds, a kukri, food, ground-sheet, and blanket. Odgeson had the privilege of a first-aid kit, for use until any cracked-up flyer could be transported to a better-equipped blood-wagon waiting at the bottom of the hill, for which possibility each party (never to be far apart) packed a collapsible stretcher. “A small but well-organized expedition”—I expect is what they’re saying to themselves back at camp, the CO and Adj flicking their handlebar moustaches and thumping each other pally-like on the shoulder as they stick pins in maps spread on the table to mark the slow progress of my duffed-up and aching legs.

Even so, it’s marvellous how at times my thoughts are as clean as stars on a dark night. Maybe when I get back to England, where there’s clarifying frost and snow, I’ll be able to see things intelligent and stark, read a lot and learn to use big words and know what they mean so that Pauline will say: “Hark at him! Swallowed a dictionary!” whenever I come out with one.

A matter of fifty yards and they swung into the jungle, brushing aside creepers in an initial burst of exuberance at being on the move. It was marvellous, marvellous, and a jolly efficient show, the CO would be saying, yet the time was midday and they had been shaken to life at five, which was seven hours ago. So how little energy can you have when it takes a day’s work to get started? The idea stabbed his resistance at the beginning: they were to shin-up with all speed to the crest or ridge, descend by different routes, lunge up again at another angle until someone caught sight of the plane or any shot-out component of it, making crazy red-pencilled zigzags on the map like wounded flies.

Stumbling over trees in a well-spaced single-file, chopping at creepers that could not be booted down, Brian was already exhausted. Little was visible through the dim shadows of giant trees, and constantly freeing his rifle from some stray creeper, he climbed automatically, peering ahead and to left and right in the hope that some part of the plane would show itself. Blisters began at his heels, sore spots that grew fat on the aqua vitae of his life, that soon from the movement and constriction of his boots burst into the covering of woollen sock, stuck there until he pulled them loose during a pause. Which was unwise, he discovered on setting out again, for the soreness took on a new lease of torment against him — that nevertheless had to be lived with.

At two in the afternoon Odgeson signalled a rest, and they collapsed against trees, to rip open tins of meat, snap at biscuits and bars of chocolate. “What I’d like to know,” Brian called to the others, “is who’s coming up to rescue us?” After a ten-minute smoke they went on, and in another ten minutes it seemed as if they hadn’t rested at all.

If I stopped and lay down, I wouldn’t get up again. Even the thought of those poor wounded bastards can’t make me go quicker. All I want to do is sleep. Why didn’t they crash in swamp or sea? They’d have been back safe now without this godless grind. Maybe we’ll find them soon and zoom off to camp. Christ, though what if we couldn’t even hope for that, if we were flying from the Japs in war with no place to go, or if we were Communists running before the Grenadier Guards? In that case we’d soon be out of it, one way or another. He pulled off his boots: one blister had turned white, puffed out like a growth of dirty flour over his skin, and hurt more now, as if the air were infectious and gathered it more quickly than the wool. A heavy inappropriate plane roared along the level of the hill, then lifted and flew back at a less dangerous height.

They climbed through bushes and between threatening trees, drying up one dark patch of sweat only to have another painted there as if with a wet brush while they weren’t looking. It seemed to Brian after a while that, should he for some reason stop climbing, his legs would go on making the same pedalling ache of ascent, out of control like a puppet with St. Vitus’s Dance. By six they were on the crest, marked on the map as three thousand feet. “We’ve done wonders,” Odgeson said.

“We ought to get the VC for this,” Cheshire grinned.

“They could stuff it,” said Baker.

“Let’s find them bastards,” Brian said, “and get out of it.”

They began the descent, slithering on an altered compassbearing. Since Gunong Barat, they had developed an instinctive feeling for the shape of the earth under its great wadding of ponderous trees, sensed like ants in the gloom of thistle-strewn hillocks the easy climbs or pitfalls of a quick descent long before they were seen or felt by the feet. To Brian the smell, humidity, quality of travail, the intense silence of desperation felt whenever they paused to rest, seemed now like home and second-nature, an acknowledged fight on the earth connected to a lesser-known and felt contest in the jungle deep within himself, a matching that in spite of his exhaustion made the trip seem necessary and even preordained.

At dusk, his eyes lost their sharp vision — as if he needed glasses to make leaves and the hats of the others clear again. They watched the sun setting over Pulau Timur, the length of the distant island settling into the sea like a silent deserted raft. Clouds above were spearheads pointing down the sea, so vividly red that it looked as if, while they stared, a tremendous sausage of blood had just burst over the island’s black hills and rolled a lava of sunset into its concealed valleys.

By seven it was too dark to go on searching, and Baker worked on the radio to make contact with Knotman’s party (the others sitting around as if, in the dark forest, he were trying to get through to some listening God for instructions), until Knotman answered: “That you, Baker? As if I didn’t know. We haven’t seen anything yet, so we’ll bed down for the night. Went up to the north ridge and looked into the next valley. So now we’re halfway to the bottom again. Did you see the sunset over Pulau Timur? It looked like the end of the world from this side. We contacted the army an hour ago, and they’ll stay with us tonight, moving in your direction in the morning. I think we’re about a mile away, but you can’t tell in this.”

Brian spread his ground-sheet and blanket in the undergrowth and drifted along tunnels of weird dreams, emerged into the dazzling half-light and half-dark of a snowstorm, heavy white flakes falling thickly around and chilling him to the bone as he fought against it. When the storm stopped, the fields were white over, the sky a milk blue, low and still threatening. But the snow-covered fields, in spite of his shivering, felt good to be in.

He opened his eyes to wonder where he was, and the warm smell of the jungle told him. Someone else was awake, sitting with hands clasped around his knees nearby. Hoping it was almost dawn, Brian looked at his watch: four-thirty, its luminous hand glowed. He felt for his rifle, and cursed to realize it was the first thing he thought of. I should throw it away. “How long do you guess this search’ll go on?”

“It depends on our luck,” Odgeson said. “We could be kept knocking around for a fortnight.”

Brian lit a cigarette, and threw one over: “It’s a long time to be slogging around in this.”

“We’ll be relieved in a few days,” Odgeson guessed. “Somebody else will take over.”

“Not that I couldn’t go on for weeks. It’s funny the way I feel in two minds about it.” Like everything, he added to himself.

“I suppose we all do,” Odgeson said. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness, red flies helicoptering on the warm buoyancy of their thoughts. Odgeson fell asleep but Brian smoked half a tin of cigarettes before it got light.

At six Knotman came through on the radio: the two parties would descend and make contact with the jeeps in a couple of hours. Another jungle-rescue unit had been flown up from Singapore and would join the search. Odgeson acknowledged and they set off.

After a sweet breakfast of canned milk, and the sun’s warm penetration to his rheumatic bones, Brian felt renewed. Yet in the first hour he was plunged to the senile age of ninety. He felt weak and nondescript, was already fed up with the zigzag futility of the trip. Scabs were forming in his armpits, sore from the sweat of continual movement, and now the same mechanical ascendency over the chafing pain had to be won as over the blisters on his feet the previous day. The six days on Gunong Barat seemed by comparison an easygoing romp in which he had held out fine against the rigours of jungle travel, even though he’d lugged twice the weight on his donkey-back. “I can’t see why they didn’t hold us in the village until the planes had spotted something,” he called out at the first rest, as if to make it a subject of general discussion.

“It isn’t always easy to see things in the jungle, as you know,” Odgeson answered, “even from the air. In any case, I imagine the CO knows what he’s doing. We don’t have all his headaches, do we?”

“I suppose the CO and his pals couldn’t wait to start moving pins about on the maps,” Brian said.

Cheshire stood up with mock pride: “It’s the first time I’ve been a pin on a map.”

“I don’t suppose it’ll be the last time,” Baker retorted. “You’re a regular, aren’t you, you poor sod?”—which brought no answer.

“It’ll be the last time for me, though,” Brian affirmed.

“You can never be sure about that,” Odgeson said in a tone of resentment, as if they were blaming him for their hardship.

“I can.” Brian felt a sudden hatred of Odgeson, who, he realized, would never forget whose side he was on.

“That remains to be seen, Seaton.”

“It don’t.” Blind obstinacy brought the words out, as well as the conviction that what he said would come to pass. Even no backing from Baker or Cheshire could not weaken his words: I’m on my own, he thought, and don’t need help from anyone. “We ain’t been told to write ON ACTIVE SERVICE on our letters for nothing, and we ain’t lugging rifles this time to fire at shadows or fireflies.”

Odgeson saw what was wrong. “I’m not interested in discussing politics. All I want is to get these chaps out of that plane. In other words, while we’re up here, you’ll do as I tell you to do.”

“All I said,” Brian said, “was that this was the last time I’m going to be a pin on a bloody map. And I mean it. And nobody’s going to stop me saying what I feel.”

“All right, so you’ve said it. But if you say it once more, you’ll be on a charge when we get back to camp. I don’t care how near the boat you are.”

Brian was the last to move, looked through the trees over the three of them forming the bottom loop of a letter S — Odgeson leading. We argue and the slob throws his rank, but I’ve got something to throw at him in my hand: I could put a bullet into his sanctimonious mug and nobody would be much the wiser. I can’t think of any better reason for carrying this lead-heavy rifle and fifty shells. You’ve got a mouth to speak with and good cause for opening it, and even when what you say’s got nothing to do with tearing your guts out to find that aircrew, you still get told to wrap-up. You might as well be in the grave if you don’t open your trap.

Baker had taken the lead, but everyone at the same time saw an enormous wound in a tree before them, bleached by some meteor-scoop from the sky. The uppers of the tree were ripped down, flayed open and back like the rough parting on a doll’s head long after Christmas. Brian’s heart beat heavily, and a slice of steel was nicked into sudden glinting light by the sun. Their troubles seemed over. “It’s trying to send morse to us,” he thought. Under the dark shed of the trees the hillside flattened, became more varied instead of the common up or down, and they followed a ploughed lane of cracked twigs and creepers, snapped so that sap and juice still stained the white ends and were sticky to the touch. A shallow trench of iron-coloured upturned soil started and finished after a few yards, and embedded in a bank was the battered and clawed-at nacelle of an aircraft engine. It lay well into the clay, as if it had been shot dead before swallowing the hard bite of earth it had gone mad for and crashed down from the sky to get. They stood amazed and awed, in spite of having expected eventually to find something like it, at seeing a piece of marvellous engineering planted in the middle of this primeval smell. “Now where’s the rest of it?” Odgeson wondered.

“Scattered all over the mountain,” Baker said. “We’ll have to sweat blood for every piece.” Brian was past caring: “What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo?”

“You’re right: the bits that count can be miles away,” Odgeson said to Baker. They separated, split four ways like a signpost and agreed to meet at given whistle-signals.

Brian was alone and liked it, walked from the nacelle with a feeling of ease as if taking a stroll on a quiet afternoon. The landscape was different, humid and arduous still when he had to clamber up a bank, yet being beyond the sight and sound of the group was an immense relief. The jungle appeared less alien, and he felt that it was somehow tamed for him, that he was beginning to understand even the harmlessness and maybe necessity of it. Voluminous leafage moved back to his advance, and the underfoot smell had a richness of decay that no longer held a threat of fever, equal to fresh air since the wind was still, and it took away his incentive to peer up through the tall trunks for a pinprick glimpse of the sky. Water dripped slowly down a rockface and, finding no stream bed, he churned the soil into a red mud that hung on to his boots like manacles — much as he’d sought to enjoy every street pool with his wellington boots as a small boy.

After a quick smoke he swung himself under and over creepers, going up another bank until, reaching leveler ground at the top, he saw someone staring from between parted leaves. It was a white face below short black hair, gaunt yet with the sort of calm experience and gentleness that becomes ferocious when roused for no plain reason. Brian also noticed that he wore a green shirt, before sliding to lower ground with the intention of taking cover by a tree. But the man was already leaping, a kris poised.

An overwhelming grenade of sick fear burst in his stomach, yet within this cloud he felt himself struggling free of his pack and shouting wildly, hoping the others weren’t too far off, in a long high meant-to-be-everlasting yell that carried little distance through the trees and undergrowth. His pack rolled, and while discarding he had considered the wisdom of hanging on to it; he only now knew this feeling to have been reasonable when he saw his rifle sliding away at the same time.

He reached level earth, fear and hysteria in every extremity of his limbs. Yet he felt himself existing in different zones of consciousness, waiting and watching his chance instead of backing away on the chance of escaping the deathly feel of the blade. The tree, soil, bushes, and smell of the jungle, the dank fatigue-memory of the fruitess search, became locked in his senses. The man grunted (The daft bastard thinks we’re going to hurt him. Why?) and the split-second in which the kris stayed poised was a long enough time in the soundless trees to make him pleasantly surprised at taking in so much detail — a lightning speed of animal assessment extracted from his unwritten nightmare journal of afterwards.

The wavy blade of the kris was rusty, as if it had been left uncovered in jungle rain, though it was grey near the edge to show it had lately been sharpened. I’m finished, he thought — a short message flashed by the enemy part of himself — I’m going to be killed. He shouted out in terror, catching the man’s emotion, who breathed heavily and grunted as he struck. His hands went out, as if the fires of survival had set themselves alight in his brain.

Both sprang together: his arms sped with uncanny precision towards the blade — an old ruse of unarmed combat taught him by Bill Eddison at the cardboard factory years ago. He fastened both wrist and elbow of the wiry arm gripping the kris, and pressed them with all strength away and backwards. Terrified that the trick had worked, the sweat of control poured from him and he fought as much to keep up his determination to carry it through as to vanquish the actual danger.

He fixed his eyes on what was visible of the blade, which stayed so long in place that he had a desire to laugh at the possibility of it’s being glued there, resisting this weakness because it would rob him of strength. The man grunted and kicked, swayed the trapped arm and struck out with the one still free, but Brian ignored the smashing of his ankles, and the kris didn’t stay long enough in place for the man to think of trying to reach it by the blade-end. The more Brian ground his teeth and pressed, the easier it became to make his attacker drop the kris. It seemed a stupid task, as if the man’s arm would break, because all the brute force of his labouring days was behind the pressure and he knew that no one could stand it for long. He wanted to laugh and let the arm go, tell the man to blow town and not be so bleeding daft. The kris slid into the leaves and he pushed the man back, rammed like lightning with his fist and boot, then drew away. His fear returned now and, gasping and stumbling against his pack and rifle, he watched the man free himself from the bush and search among the undergrowth.

Brian picked up the rifle: he’s a nut case and might try something else, but if he does I’ll bash him over the skull with this. I’ll plaster his loaf all over the trees. Why did he want to come for me like that? He drew back the bolt, slotted it in, a mechanical noise whose significance he only realized as its clear echo died away, retrieving a picture of a dog by his DF hut lying like a length of rag and floorcloth with a hole in its head. The Chinese dropped the kris, stayed a dozen yards off with lifted hands, close enough for Brian to see the left side of his lips twitching on an otherwise hard and resigned face. What’s he put his hands up for? Why don’t he get running? He drew back the catch to safety, unwilling to press the trigger by accident and be brought up for murder: that’s a charge Odgeson wain’t be able to put me on. The silence grew: Brian shifted his stance, cracked twigs.

“Ger moving,” he said, half afraid the man might be crazy and make another rush. “Piss off”—threatening to kill him should he refuse.

Words as if spoken by another person deep in his own mind told him he was a bandit, though Brian repressed the thought as being the safest thing for the man before him, and for himself. Maybe he doesn’t understand English: “Scoot, for — ” But the man lost his bewilderment and neutral face of capture, turned and leapt along the level of the jungle, scrambling away fast. Brian stood, still and frozen, then his hand shook, and he held the rifle between his legs while he leaned against a tree to light a cigarette. A plane droned overhead, but he was too shaken to look, could only stare at the soil and undergrowth. The war in Malaya and all he’d heard of it seemed to have no relevance in this forest foreclosed with darkness and humidity, and he told himself that maybe the man had a hut and garden nearby and thought he was someone who had plundered it last week, so had been waiting in ambush for him to come back.

Weakened by legs that seemed turned to rubber, and a sensation of chaos and death — he sure wanted to kill me, by the look on his mug — he made his way towards where he had parted from the others. Maybe the man had been a bandit, but Brian threw the idea away, then drew it back and hung on to it as though, should this be true, it might turn out to mark some saving of his sanity, to be the salvation of his soul in some unpredictable manner. In any case, he wouldn’t have been a bandit but a Communist. There was a difference — that much he easily saw. The picture that crossed his mind was of a gloomy autumnal dinner-hour opposite the factory canteen a few years back during the war, a composite memorial of many dinner-hours spent in that way. A Communist speaker stood talking about the Soviet Union bleeding to death in the good fight against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists, saying it was time Britain and America started that second front now, when a voice from the crowd heckled: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army, mate?” But somebody capped the heckler with: “Why aren’t yo’?”—which stopped his gallop with even bigger laughs.

Brian leaned against a tree, screaming with laughter, a mad humorous rage tearing itself out: “And I let him go! Odgeson and all you bastards, I let him go because he was a comrade! I didn’t kill him because he was a man.” The certain knowledge that he had been a bandit was a fist that made him lie down in the soil, curl up, and go on laughing, separate from himself yet unable to look on, roaring at the outcome of his own safety, no matter what the man had been. The bastard, though, I should a pulled the rifle up to my shoulder and pinned him to the soil with a bullet like he would have done to me with his kris if I’d given him half the chance. He smoked a cigarette: I’d better get back and see if the others have found the plane. But if any clever bastard says to me: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army?” I’ll give him the biggest mouthful he’s ever heard. He walked on, quiet in his tracking for fear that other bandits were about, and that if there was a next time he might not be so lucky. Stone-cold with horror, he suddenly recognized the nacelle where he had parted from the rest, an aluminium case holding a complex aero-engine whose image vividly recalled the click of the safety-catch a few minutes before. He bounded up the bank, beyond the sinister machine-product, towards where he hoped the others would be. Without forethought, he fired off rounds into the treetops and sky, let fly half a dozen rapid shots at what ghosts and remnants of his conscripted mind the sight of the Communist had let loose. He emptied the magazine, lobbing the rest more carefully at manufactured shadows between the trees, each round buried into some distant invisible soil or trunk after a heyday crack that seemed powerful enough to scare and weal the whole range of mountains. “What did you do in the war, dad?” “I caught a Communist and let him go.” “What did you do that for, then?” “Because he was a man.” And not everybody’ll look at me gone-out. “Brian, my lad, I’m proud o’ you,” the old man would say.

Calmer now, though still bright-eyed (I feel like a paper lantern, all hollow and lit up), he made his way along the hillside. Odgeson, Baker, and Cheshire walked a few paces in front, making so much noise they didn’t hear him trailing them. “Hey,” he shouted. “Seen owt yet?”

They gathered into a group. “We heard some shooting over there, so we’re heading for it in case it’s Knotman’s mob.”

“It was me,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “A bloke came for me, a bandit I suppose, because he bolted when he saw I’d got a rifle. I didn’t hit him, though.”

“It sounded like a machine-gun,” Cheshire said. “You must a been cross-eyed not to bring him down.”

Odgeson looked serious: “We’d better stay close and watch out. There aren’t enough stretchers for all of us.”

“Knotman shouldn’t be too far away, with the army,” Baker called from behind. “Shall I get them on the blower?”

Odgeson thought not. “They won’t be listening anyway, so let’s get moving and not have so many questions.”

“He’s coming out of his shell on this trip,” Brian said to Baker as they trekked on. “These pally bastards allus turn out to be the worst.”

Baker was close behind and replied: “My old man says that in the Great War they used to shoot about ten officers a month. The Germans got the rest of them.”

“It didn’t mek much difference,” Brian said. “They kept scraping ’em up from somewhere.”

“The reason the war ended, though, was because they were running out of officers, not because they didn’t have enough bods like us. I’ve been to a public school, Brian, but I’m just a slave like you are.”

“Belt up,” Brian said.

“That’s no argument.”

“It’s an answer, though. I might be a slave this minute but I’m going to stop being one soon.”

“Only because they’re letting you go.”

“That ain’t what I mean. I don’t care if it takes five years: I’m going to stop being a slave.”

“Close up,” Odgeson shouted back. “Here’s some more of the plane.”

“It’s like a jig-saw puzzle,” Cheshire said. “Three-and-six from Woolworth’s.”

“You’ll never stop being a slave to something,” Baker said.

A tail elevator of shining aluminium lay in their path like a gate barring their way to an abundant and well-cultivated small-holding. They stepped over it one by one, as if afraid to damage it and have to pay the farmer for its repair: Baker had the sense to kick it fiat. Brian took the radio from him: “I didn’t try and hit that bandit I saw back there. I fired plenty, but hoped I wouldn’t get him.”

“I wouldn’t be able to stop myself,” Baker replied, not believing. A clearing had been brewed out of the jungle by the main wreck of the plane: it had come to rest against the far end of a plateau, a cigar-shaped fuselage, a priceless accomplishment hanging dead and derelict halfway down between the trees, pieces of wing and wood and glittering fabric scattered all around. It was inaccessible without ropes, ten or fifteen feet up, looking like the victim of an unsuccessful attempt to decorate a Christmas tree. They stood fifty yards off, speechless after having searched for what seemed like weeks. The fuselage was scattered with rips along its frame where branches had impeded its clumsy uncalled-for descent, some foliage seeming to grow out of the plane itself as if it had been there far longer than forty hours. There was no movement, noise, or cries of life from it. On the underbelly by the pilot’s cabin, as though some great hand had given it a nosebleeder, was a broad crimson mark, dried and hardly noticeable in the first look. “O Christ,” Brian said, unloading the radio.

“What a way to die.” Baker slung down his pack.

“Poor bastards,” said Cheshire. My stomach’s hard, but my heart’s as sick as a dog’s, Brian felt, while Odgeson blew his guts out on the jungle-rescue whistle, hoping to reach Knotman and the army. Its dull throat-notes filled the air, low and warbling, the sort of alarm-noise that during the war sent Colin and Dave scurrying from their fireside cups of tea into the backyard and cold November streets to avoid the coppers they imagined after them. When Odgeson had no breath left, he asked Brian to have a go.

It was accepted, and he flexed his lungs so that both God and the Devil would hear, only to be startled by the solid lead-heavy crack of what seemed a tree bough, as though the plane had weighed sufficiently and long enough to snap one down. Baker ducked, as if, Brian thought, the whistle unblown between his lips, the bough was right above their heads and threatening to fall. Another sharp crack revealed this and the first as rifle shots — now they were all down, pressed into the undergrowth as, from the direction of the plane, in the thick bush under its stranded body, leapt a wide-toothed saw of bullets, flying close around, burning into tree bark or burying their noses into soft clammy soil. It wasn’t difficult to find cover: Brian moved back, dragging the wireless set, to shield his face, towards a length of tree trunk that kept his guts secure, though he felt his feet exposed at the mixture of twigs, leaves, and random bullets scattering about them like the butt-end of a typhoon thunderstorm. The incredible noise numbed him with a feeling of helplessness, as if the bullets came from such an army that it was no use fighting back, like an uneven rattling against the palings of hell that left only the impulse to press hands to each ear. “It’s the army,” Cheshire said. “The bastards think we’re bandits. Hey!” he shouted. “It’s us. Nark it, for Christ’s sake!”

Odgeson and Baker were sending bullets across the clearing in the general line of fire, though this was difficult to pin down, for after the first rush it seemed more scattered and spasmodic. “The army can’t be that far off,” Odgeson yelled. “They’re bound to hear this racket.”

Brian pressed a clip into his magazine, raised himself to line foresight and backsight through the undergrowth, settled for a hefty yard-wide monster of a tree and let fly — harmlessly. I’d better hold back, he thought. The others’ll have nowt left in a bit. Fear and sickness grew into him and he lowered his head, an image flashed from his first life of when he had been in gang-fights, each manoeuvring warrior-band hurling showers of stones and bottle-tops through the blue sky above tips or field. Though every missile was dangerous and shunned as if it carried death, he had stayed fixed on the ground to be held with the rest of them, whether or not he had been frightened of injury at that particular hour.

In such danger he lived on two levels, one of fear, and one of not taking the fear seriously so that the situation seemed a harmless though perhaps foolish kind of game. He looked up, lifted his rifle to fire but could see no one, peered a while at the thick enclosing foliage in the half-darkness of the jungle. There were neither faces nor movement around the wrecked plane, though bullets still came at an uneven rate from it. In a one-second reflection, Brian reasoned that maybe the bandits had difficulty in seeing them as well, though as if to call him liar and point out that this was no game, a bullet went too close to Odgeson’s elbow as he was lifting for a cool aim. He swore with shock and the rifle jumped from his hands as if a charge of electricity had gone through it, wounding him so that all he could do, and did, was get the whistle up to his mouth and use what extra strength had been given his lungs due to the incapacitated arm — blowing so that the noise rose even above a renewed burst of firing.

Brian did not want to lift his head and be killed, but when he forgot for a few seconds that to be killed was possible, he drew the butt into his shoulder and failed to see anything worth aiming at. Maybe the bastard that got away from me is busy letting us have it from over there: though when he did press out a trio on rapid fire, he had no desire to kill or wound because the sense that they were caught in some kind of game was still with him. They want to kill us, though, he thought with bitterness, firing into the bushes so that for once, at least, he had as much chance as Cheshire of stopping someone’s gallop for good. Bullets came back. They’re rich in ammunition, he surmised, as they smacked into iron trees or came fizzing so uncomfortably close that the dam of fear broke and pushed his face into the now sweet-smelling soil.

Baker had finished his ammo and was rifling Odgeson’s pack for more clips. The noise, according to each bullet’s often accidental trajectory, varied from the snap of giant dead branches to the hollow receding echo singing on a last journey down the mountainside, from the savage and vicious clout against a tree to the dull burial in a pillow of soil; and amid all this was the low moan of Odgeson’s whistle signalling for help. Brian filled in the gaps of their firing, making his own noise for survival, though he knew that his bullets were having no effect, and hoped that no one would notice that they weren’t.

He laughed, a shattering loud cry that the others were too busy to bother about: I’m making a present for Mimi, he thought. A goodbye gift in not shooting to kill maybe someone who, for all I know, is the old boy-friend she had at high school in Singapore. He lay on the damp earth of the forest, some yards from a rampart of covering tree trunk, reloading with fresh clips dragged out of his pack. His refusal to get caught up in trying to kill the Communists (who were clearly wanting to slaughter them for a rich haul in rifles and wireless gear) held him from the advantages of rage and excitement that might have given him the semblance of courage. As it was, the level of fear stayed with him, burning his face and eyes and causing his guts to creak like the timbers of an old battleship.

When the other two blazed away, he bent his head down, coughing and choking into wet leaves, bringing up phlegm and hurling it from his bone-dry throat, having recalled his father’s mad roar: “God? God is a bastard. Bastard God”—though the words did nothing to ease his fear and he pushed them out of his mind to lift himself and take aim once more, at nothing. If they charge, he realized, they’ll finish us off. They know there’s only four of us, so why are they messing about? If they show themselves in a charge, I’ll wing a few and no mistake, though that wain’t do any good to why I’m lying here — which is not to fire at my pals. He laughed, and Cheshire stared at him, a brief glance of incredulity before returning to his skilful defence.

The surprise marked on the coin of his face sent a memory back to Brian as he, too, simulated an angry few rounds rapid, a memory of some chargehand from the Raleigh recounting how his father had behaved with bravery and foolhardiness during the war (that’s a laugh: what’s all this pot-shooting if it ain’t a war?) one blacked-out midnight when a German bomber had machine-gunned the factory. Harold Seaton had stood in the main wide road of the works, looking into the sky and cursing, as the Jerry plane let rip on its second time round, while his pals from the sheltering doorways yelled for him to come in and not be a bleddy fool. But Harold had stayed there, working while the bullets sped like the patter of tiny clogged feet running for their lives around and by him, the first and last time he had shown a remarkable calmness in a situation in which it would have been natural and useful to have scattered in four directions — whereas a misplaced word from someone at home would have sent him into a black and uncontrolled fury. Still, he’d got guts, Brian remembered, so maybe some of ’em have been passed on to me here, and I’ll use ’em not to fire at the bandit-Communists in spite of the fact that in one way my fingers are itching to.

Baker seemed cool enough, knew himself to be calm, what’s more, and enjoyed knowing it, firing as accurately as he was able and not bothering about the risk. He’ll get the VC, the daft bastard, though Brian saw as well that Baker’s lips were turned down in anger as he took aim and fired, though in anger at who or what, Brian refused to imagine. He listened now and again for answering signals from Knotman or the army, but heard nothing: a dim surging whistle in the distance turned out to be an echo of Odgeson’s still strong blasts. He caught himself laughing at the idea of their making a charge towards the wreckage — the bravest and most desperate military operation he could imagine. The end of it struck him like a cheap picture in a chewing-gum packet for future generations of children, number one in the series before real-life depictions came through: Odgeson or any officer-commanding leading them to the razor’s-edge point of success, then turning round and panic-roaring to them in the thick of it: “Run for your lives! Every man for himself!”

Brian’s head was low, feeling for another clip. There were four or five still left and, sliding the bolt in, he saw a large red ant — head, body, and feelers out on a private patrol of its own — walk cautiously from a leaf on to his hand. It stopped to smell and reconnoitre this new earth of hairs and skin, took a few more paces into the unmapped interior until the grimy nail of Brian’s finger flicked it back on to more familiar earth. “Get to where it’s safe, you ginger-haired bastard.”

Another whistle sounded through the trees, away to the left, and the noise against them seemed to relax because of it, though both Cheshire and Baker fired rapidly into some movement now discernible beneath the plane, and Odgeson never stopped blasting his whistle. He was pale, wearing a look of death-like exhaustion as if he were about to keel over. “They’re beating it,” Brian called to him. “The others must be close.” He aimed at the trees, at nothing, an erratic blade of fire to help with the impression of patriotic or devoted noise that still covered the hillside like a sliding roof. “If you’ve got any more slugs left,” Cheshire called, “I’ll ’ave ’em. My bleeders are about finished.”

“I want ’em for mysen,” Brian said. “Keep your nut down: they’re still here.”

“I suppose them army crumbs are going to spoil all this for us.” There was a sudden silence, as if the bandits had abandoned the wreckage. Then another burst came to prove that some remained: the loony bastards’ll get killed if they don’t scram quick. “I’ll be glad when I’m out of this lot,” he called to Baker, lifting himself to fire high into the trees.

“Don’t waste them,” Baker said. “They haven’t gone yet: I can see one moving.”

“I’m not.” Their firing was filled and renewed by the first of the army, seasoned and competent in jungle-green as they came through the trees, cautiously blazing away. Brian laughed: “We’ll be back in camp today, after we’ve cleared this lot up,” he called to Baker. “I’ll be glad an’ all.”

“Me, too,” Baker said. “I wish I was.…” He exposed himself too soon, and an explosion switched his face around, as though an insect had flown into his eye and taken him by surprise with its powerful sting. He lifted one hand to coax it out, then fell back, revealing that he had no face left.

Down through the jungle and wearied to death, Brian thought back to nearly two years ago, when Baker had been alive on the troop-ship leaving England, and Brian had stood alone by the rail, watching the dockside, with its huge sheds and Martian spatula-footed cranes, get farther away as the water of midstream eddied and churned around them. Tugs heaved it clear and clouds of gulls squealed in fancy flight at the prospect of swill and scraps, and a group of soldiers down the rail were trying to hit them with sharp crossbow bolts of white spit. Brian smiled at their near-misses, wondering whether his aim would be any better, but not bothering to try because there were other things to look at. Bilious clouds were stacked over the Isle of Wight, as stationary and important as if they were part of an urgent stockpile waiting to be transported to some mythical D-day beach. Before them on the blue water was a derrick-laden, top-heavy American ship, and Brian took his hat off to stop the sudden wind flinging it over the side as a tidbit for the gulls. Water foamed into salt-white patches below the stern, and at the gentle rocking of the ship he hoped he wouldn’t heave his guts up at the open sea — his first time out on any ocean — recalling how as sick as a dog he’d been the whole twenty-seven miles to Worksop, where he was evacuated in 1939, leaving his pale-faced bile between Newstead and the Trent, between pit-scars of the Derbyshire hills and the stately halls of the Dukeries. They drifted by the Queen Mary, left it behind, and came towards the green banks of the Isle of Wight, a turreted manor showing itself between the trees. Up Southampton Water, sheds and cranes packed the blue skyline of the quays, ships of all sorts scattered over the blue water, some with funnels smoking thinly like a tailor-made, others in a full steam of thick twist. Marvellous, I’m glad to be leaving England, even though the old man did say I was a bloody fool and wanted my brains testing for not getting out of it, and even though Pauline might never forgive me if she thought I’d had a chance of not getting sent over on compassionate grounds. Not that I’m sure I could have got out of it, anyway; though if I get broken-hearted to be going, I hope it won’t be till I’m a thousand miles away and can’t swim back. He winced at a thump on his shoulder and, trying not to turn at it, said: “I can tell that’s you, Baker, you bastard.” But he did turn, and Baker leaned towards him like the Tower of Pisa, standing on tiptoe to make himself six inches taller instead of three. “Are you glad to be off?” he asked, coming to his normal height. “You bet,” Brian said. “I’ve allus wanted to do a bunk from England and see other countries. For as long as I can remember.” Excited gangs stood all over the ship, pointing out the sights. “They’re glad, anyway,” Baker said. He squinted at Brian through his rimless glasses: “It’s my first time as well. The old man’s been promising me a holiday in Switzerland since the end of the war, but it hasn’t turned up so far.” They watched a Beaufighter take a running torpedo-drop at target boards in the Solent, its blue underbelly roaring across flattened greenish water. “I write to a girl in Switzerland, so I’d like to go there for sentimental reasons,” Baker said. “I’d never get sentimental about a country,” Brian scoffed. “In some ways I wouldn’t care if I never saw this joint again.” The ship swung slowly east and along Spithead towards Portsmouth. A surfaced submarine passed, then a destroyer, each dipping its flags. “I thought you were married, though,” Baker said. “That’s hard luck. All I’m leaving behind is my motorbike.” Brian lit a cigarette, flipped the dead match into a drain at his feet. The moving tide slapped against the ship. Someone farther along pointed out the warships Ramillies and Malaya at Portsmouth, and the coastal forts built against Napoleon. “That word ‘Malaya’ seems familiar,” Baker laughed. “Or will soon, I expect,” Brian said, looking up from the hypnotic rush of sea passing the ship’s waterline. Baker observed with calm superciliousness the coast going by:

“England

This syphilitic isle

This seat of majesty

This lump of excrement.”

“As long as you don’t include Nottingham in that,” Brian said. “You haughty bastard.”

“Patriotism,” Baker sneered.

“If you think I’m patriotic,” Brian said, “you’ve got another thought coming. I’m hungry. Let’s go down and see if we can’t snatch summat to eat.”

CHAPTER 28

His mother had written to let Brian know that Merton’s collection of prize horseshoes was to be divided among the family, and that she had put one by for when he came back. “You can nail it up on your door as soon as you and Pauline get a council house,” she added. The horseshoe again set him thinking of the picture in his grandmother’s parlour, of the girl holding a bunch of flowers and saying to the youth by her side: “If you love me as I love you, nothing can ever part us two”—which, pleasurably brooding on his living with Pauline, was how he felt about her. On the last day of his embarkation leave they had walked beyond Strelley Church, lingered between Cossal and Kimberley, wherein one part of the earth had been ripped open, and the humps and hollows they had often made love in while courting were scraped to the grey bones of a lunar landscape. To the left of undiscovered coal was a grey-pencilled wood surrounded by black upturned soil, and scattered beyond, a patrol of trees silhouetted their branches like half-opened fans. From behind came the thud of engines and the sigh of slave-driven cranes, while at their feet were dark up-ended rows of rich loam, heavy and wet, yet light on some crests where the loam had dried in the wind, miniature mountain-ranges still flecked with snow, a whiteness reminding him, in the clear cool air, of the milk of babies — and the fact that they had to walk back home so that Pauline could feed Bernard.

He shivered to think of it, and as the last notes of an unnecessary message from Saigon died away, he thought of the death of his grandfather. He heard about it from his mother and aunts, how Merton one morning took a stick and walked past the Cherry Orchard to see whether there was still anything left of the wheatfield and Serpent Wood. It was an uncertain spring, clouds hurriedly dividing the empire of the sky after a fine start to the morning, a biting wind worrying grass and hedge-leaves already clumsy with rain that had pelted down in the night. The hollow tree in which Brian had often played now lay across a ditch, with branches scattered around, to be collected as firewood by kids from nearby prefabs. The navvies had been laid off because of bad weather, and the trackway of a projected road was deserted, odd planks to one side seesawing over cement bags, heaps of rammel pointing to grey sky. Even in such weather, it was good to walk and smell fresh wind that had come over the fields from Trowel and Bramcote — though these deserted trenches and half-built houses made the land look a battlefield up for GOC’s inspection: a wilderness. By the wood a fine rain began spitting on the leaves, so with a snort of contempt he turned back, walking along puddle-holed footpaths as fresh gusts rammed the bare trees, easing up only to let down heavier drops of rain. “Didn’t expect this bleddy lot,” he muttered, stooping as he walked, coat collar pulled up, though his shoulders and legs were already wet.

He stamped into the house, was enveloped in a comforting and familiar smell of steam pudding and sausages bursting their skins in the oven pan. “Where yer bin?” Mary cried, seeing his hair and face soaked. “You’ll get yer death o’ code, going out in such weather.” She poked at the coal-fire: “Come on, get out o’ them trousers and ’ave a warm.”

He hung his jacket by the door and loosened his braces: “Don’t bloody-well fuss. I only went to see the new road they’re pushing through. I wun’t a gone if I’d a known it’d a pissed like this.” He stripped to his vest and rubbed head and arms vigorously. “I’ll get yer a cup o’ tea wi’ a drop o’ whisky in it,” she said. “That’ll set you up, if I know yer.”

After dinner he went to bed and slept till tea-time; but came down feeling heavy and still anchored to an unfamiliar exhaustion.

“Gorrout tasty?” he asked from the fire, sneezing into his great spotted handkerchief. He ate chicken legs and broth, but stayed listless well into the evening.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You shun’t a gone out in that rain.” Lydia was home for tea: “Let me get you some Aspros, dad. It wain’t tek a minute, from Warrener’s.”

“Shut your rattle,” he said to them, and trod his way slowly up the creaking stairs to bed.

“He’s a nasty-tempered owd bogger,” Lydia said. “I don’t think anybody in this house has ever had a civil word from him.”

“And no more you bleddy-well will, either,” Merton said, suddenly back for his boots. “If yer’ve got owt to say, you want to tell it to my face.” He stood tall and erect by the mantelshelf, his face swarthy and well-lined, his head a bristle of white hairs. “People are only trying to be good to you,” Lydia spoke out, knowing herself to be in the right.

“I’ll bring you a drink up soon,” Mary said, “and some Aspros.”

“Ah, all right then,” he said, and went up. Sleep didn’t come easily. He tossed and sweated and grumbled all night and in the morning, when he couldn’t get out of bed, felt angry and ashamed, unable to remember when he had last been pinned there by illness. Years ago, as a girl, Vera remembered him sleeping awkwardly on two chairs before the fire when he was ill, so uncomfortable that the minute he was able to get up he would do so, stagger out to feed the pigs or get in some coal, breaking himself back into life. Illness was cowardice and weakness, and no man ever let it drive him to bed if he had any guts about him. But here he was gutless and without strength, and grieving that everyone witnessed it. When Mary said she thought he should have a doctor, his answer was: “What do I want a bleddy doctor for?”

“Because you aren’t well. You know you’re not.”

He leaned up: “If you bring a doctor up them stairs, I’ll chuck ’im out o’ that winder if it takes all my strength.” George came back from work at the cycle factory: “What’s all this then, dad? Don’t you think it’s about time you got better?” Merton thought so. “We’ll get a doctor to you then,” George said. “Do as you bleddy-well like,” Merton grunted, pulled back into sleep.

The doctor said they shouldn’t have waited so long. Merton had a severe chill. “Get that stuff from the chemist and see he takes it. I’ll call in tomorrow.”

The weather kept damp and cold, and despite a banked-up pit-fire in the bedroom, Merton stayed down. When Mary came in with bottles of medicine, he mustered strength to throw them one by one out of the window; they landed on the kennel and caused the contemporary Gyp to rattle into the open and prepare to sell itself dearly. “That’s nowt but bottled piss,” he said to the empty room. He fell to the floor, and only with tremendous effort reached the bed.

The cold deepened and gripped him in the vice of double pneumonia. The house was silent for a week, and they began to wonder whether he’d get over it — asking the question of themselves at first, but not to each other. George and Lydia, at any rate, remembered the hard times he had given them, the peremptory flames of his volatile temper. Yet talking to each other late one night, they had to admit that they had at times been boggers and deserved it — though their wondering whether or not he would get better was still less interested than Mary’s. In turn they sat with him and talked, told him what news or gossip came from town or factory or coal mine, reassured him that the chickens and garden were being well looked after. Everyone met by George and Lydia on the street — round the district and even in Nottingham — asked about Merton with great concern and weren’t slow in saying what a good bloke he was and how he’d worked all his life for the good of his family and how much of a crying shame it’d be if owt ’appened to such a fine outstanding chap. Well, Lydia said to herself, in one way nobody can deny all that. “But he’ll be all right, ma,” she cried. “He’s as strong as nails.”

“But he’s a good age, you know.”

He couldn’t listen long to their talk. Something inside stoked up the fires of his coughing, weakened him so that he lay back stiffly in sleep after a dose of medicine he no longer had strength to sling away. Mary exhausted herself caring for him, wept downstairs in the kitchen while the others were at work, and wondered however he could possibly get better from such a black and wicked cough. The rotten winter had worn them all out, frozen their guts on short rations and the wet cold misery of snow and ice. Now the weather had broken, and brought this.

The doctor said it was touch and go. But this winter had killed thousands and would kill more, though it was having a hard job with Merton. He slept easier one day, and Mary thanked God he was getting better. “He’s peaceful,” she said to George and Lydia when they came home for tea. “He’ll be all right, mother,” George said. Lydia went out later to the pictures. Mary dozed by the fire, her face wrinkled and tired, her white hair falling down. George sat at the table playing patience, a sheet of uncompleted football coupons held down by a bottle of ink and a wooden-handled pen.

In the pitch-dark bedroom Merton slept, moaning when a spark shot off the tight ball of his lived life and wheeled towards his eyes spinning away and buried in a universe of impenetrable blackness that in some ways he wanted to enter but didn’t because he knew he’d never come out of it. Then there was a light growing ahead that he tried to reach, something desirable that he sensed he could live within — though not in his lifetime. The pain seemed intent on forcing him to some course of action, but at the same time made him so weak and wish for such complete and everlasting sleep that he couldn’t take any. The light he saw was hardly a light, more a speck of lighter darkness which wasn’t so dark as the other mass of atmosphere. In spite of the prison he was locked in, he reached up to his eyes and felt tears, and knew what they were. He thought of Mary down in the kitchen: “How are you feeling?” she had asked. “A lot better,” he had told her. He thought of Oliver, who had been killed in the war, sensed that he might be about to go, and suddenly the spark of light expanded and blinded him when he fell into it. Maybe I was on his mind as well, Brian thought, as he stopped to take down a call-sign from Singapore.

He rode in a tri-shaw almost the whole way to the widow’s house, walking the last hundred yards silently through the bushes and climbing into Mimi’s room like a bandit. She took a few days off from the Boston Lights on the excuse of a cold, and they lay in bed, smoking and talking the dark hours away, drinking the bottle of whisky he usually managed to bring in his back pocket. The many hours were sweet, yet when he wasn’t there he wanted them to end and reach the day when, with kit packed, he could feel the slow train move under him on the first mile to Singapore. He wanted to rush away, because he felt ill. It was nothing he could say was eating any particular part of his body, but a slow omnivorous corrosion attacking equally his physical and mental self, so that if the lingering leave-taking of Malaya lasted many more weeks he would walk to the door of the sick quarters and say: “For Christ’s sake, I’m whacked and finished and can’t stand up any more.” Nothing serious, he laughed, watching the dawn soak itself over the palmtops from the door of his DF hut — only hypochondria, or whatever it’s called, or maybe just plain sickness of the sort that this poxetten country is drenched with. As soon as that boat gets into the Mediterranean Sea, I’ll feel fine, quick-minded, and strong again like I’ve always been.

Malaya was a battlefield whose values had no part of reality, wasn’t life to him any more, and he had to get away by taking a slow boat to England. He hoped the Communists would get Malaya, though he had no more wish to help them at the moment than he had to fight them, having dreamed the bad dream that maybe the same one who had escaped him on the mountain had later circuited back to the acid drop of an aeroplane and taken the fatal potshot at Baker. If anybody was to blame, though, it was, as far as he could see, the government who had seen to it that they were dragged up and bundled like unthinking sackbags to do guard-duty in worn-out parts of the British Empire. Maybe the government’s fed up and weary and don’t know what it’s doing. He could believe that, anyway, having long hours to ponder on such things during empty and interminable nightwatches. But the Communists aren’t weary and that’s a fact, never will be either, because they’ve got an up-and-coming vision that our side can never have any more. They used to spout outside the factory — and still do, according to Pauline’s letters — which is more than the conservatives dare do, because a lot of the Communists are working-men like ourselves and know what’s what. They’d got the kitty right enough — the whole works of his brain and heart spinning — bells, lemons, keys — back and forth like jackpots on a fruit machine. I didn’t much know what I was doing when I let that bloke go, though I’m glad I did what I did, no matter what happened. Only underneath my mind did I really know what I was doing, but that was enough and good and marvellous, because when things occur like that, it must be what I’d do anyway if I had the brains to calculate things properly like sums.

Out of the confusion of his brain grew the tangible and valid fact that between now and England he would have the human warmth of Mimi to help him stay sane and solid. It would end soon and they knew it, so they saw each other as often as possible. He went quickly through the trees to the widow’s house (BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES) even when the widow was there, silently making his blindfold way up the veranda and along to the unlocked window behind which Mimi waited. They lay naked together in bed, Mimi with her long blue-black hair down and her warm well-appointed breasts flattening against him, whispering softly, and both, even in the bliss of love, making no more noise than could be covered by night sounds of Malaya from the bushes and trees outside.

Often they were conscious of having dead time on their hands, lying in bed in the half-darkness, talking softly because the widow was in her room not far off, and because there was little to say since time was shortening before that big three-funnelled flag-bedecked boat rolled into the straits and narrows of Singapore and he tottered up its gangplank loaded to his forehead.

I wish I’d realized what I was doing when I let that bloke go. I’d still have made him scoot; but if only I’d done it cold and intentionally. He felt as if he’d been tricked and laughed at, not knowing how the trick worked or when it began to work or what had caused it to begin ticking away inside him. He had an idea, though, that it all began before he was born, certainly at a time when he was powerless to know or do anything about it. But he couldn’t come to any conclusion, maybe not wanting to, because it might tell him that after all he could blame no one for the trick that had been played on him except himself.

They heard the widow walking about her house, then silence. “She’ll start sewing now,” Mimi whispered, turning her warm body towards him. “You’ll hear the machine. It’ll go on for hours, I think.”

“It’s funny,” he said, “me not having seen the old woman. She’s been our guardian angel in one way.”

“She has.”

“What’s she like? You never say anything about her.”

“There isn’t much I can tell. I think she knows you come to stay with me now, but she doesn’t mention anything. We’ve never talked about you, but I just know she knows. Anyway, we won’t speak much. Sometimes I give her American dollar-bills so that she can exchange them for me into Malayan money, and she doesn’t give me as good a rate as the black-market. Still, it doesn’t matter. She is kind, and often she gives me rice or soup, sometimes tea when I come in late and she is still sewing or reading. When I can’t pay my rent, she doesn’t bother me.”

“Sounds a good woman.”

“She’s generous, but very careful with her money. I saw her shopping once at the market, and when she buys eggs she takes a bowl, fills it at the market tap, and tests the eggs in front of the stall-holder’s eyes. They don’t altogether like her, but she gets good eggs. Another thing, she goes shopping with her abacus frame and says: ‘I want that, how much is it?’ Tack-tack go her beads. ‘And how much is this?’ Tack-tack-tack. ‘And that?’ Tack-tack. ‘Well,’ she says, tack-tack-tack-tack, ‘that will be so much, won’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, knowing that he can’t even put on an extra cent!”

Brian reached out and lit cigarettes for them: “Is she happy, or what?”

“I think so. Why shouldn’t she be? She had shares in a rubber estate, among other things.” Smoke blew across his face. “She has relatives in Pulau Timur.”

“Why does she live alone, though? Chinese grandmothers usually live with their families, don’t they?”

“She wants to live alone. I don’t know why.”

“She’s got you in the house.”

“We don’t see each other much.”

“Not to mention me,” he laughed. “I wonder if she’ll be lonely when I’ve gone? To tell you the truth, I used to make up stories as to what she was. I imagined she was some sort of Communist agent or other, getting information, or recruiting people for the cause, a sort of commissar for north Malaya, wreaking havoc among the British occupying-power.”

She laughed. “How silly you are!”

“Well, you’ve got to have something to do at the DF hut, or you go off your head waiting for the boat to roll on.” The brief and hidden mention of his departure struck them both into a momentary silence. “Mimi,” he said, “just before we got caught in that ambush up in the mountains I captured a bandit, a Chinese.” The story came out, as he’d known it would before he left her. “I let him go,” he said, “because I couldn’t kill him. And later in the ambush I didn’t aim for anything. I fired where nothing could be hurt. It took some doing, but I held back. I did it.” He talked on, and she listened with such interest that neither approval nor disapproval was written on her face. She sat on the bed, a cigarette smouldering from her hand.

“Why?” she said at the end of it. “Why?”

He was angry that she hadn’t understood. “Because that’s how I wanted it to be,” he said. “I just thought I’d tell you, that’s all. Don’t you get it?”

The last fortnight dragged its slow length along like a chain-and-ball ankle crossing a wide high gorge by a six-inch bridge — with Brian all of a sweat that it might never get him to the other side. The camp lapsed into its state of sordid demoralized siege, and he was always glad to escape from it. Barbed wire was rolled out along the boundaries, sandbags filled and erected at vulnerable places, extra guards mounted until it seemed that only half the camp slept in the night. There was even talk that the privileged members of the signals section were to be drummed into filling sandbags. The final indignity, many said, conscription within conscription — unable to believe it could happen.

And so Merton had died, and he remembered it again, how he had taken to the earth with so little resentment after nearly fourscore years of staying in life like a fire that matched the glowing coals of his forge. His wife went six months later, drifted off into an afternoon sleep and never woke up. By which time Brian was already in Malaya, in distance even beyond their wildest dreams of Abyssinia, the limits of the fantastic world they had laughingly taunted him with on those far-off rainy evenings as a kid. When he read Kubla Khan or the Blessed Damozel and other anthological bits and pieces in the bottom-nightwatch of the DF hut, the mood cast over him equalled that tranquil dream recalled from a long way back, the mirrored image of a winter’s childhood when, one peaceful afternoon, he sat looking out of the window at another fire reflected, as if it were held up by some beneficent god for him to see as proof that there were possibilities of comfort even beyond the warmth of his own house. What had fired off this barbed harpoon, sent it zigzagging back on a tenuous line of cord, may have been his night-long reading of the poems, but it was the first time he realized that he had a past, and had not evolved out of a dream. He could say: “I remember that time walking across the Cherry Orchard ten years ago and meeting Alma Arlington,” ten years being no longer a meaningless massive chunk of time, but something that could be dissected and sorted out, and called a past. In a week he would be on that boat, going back in a way to join himself up with this past, and the idea of it was one alternately of fear and distaste, as well as one similar to the feeling that came over him when reading the poems. Nevertheless, little of the past was yet visible; and neither had he much vision of the future, but at least he knew that both existed. “This time in Malaya is a big slice out of my life,” he said to Knotman over a table crowded with bottles in a Muong bar. “Maybe it seems like that now,” Knotman argued, “but I’m telling you, you’ll look back on it in ten years and it’ll seem like a dream that lasted a few days.” “Well, I can’t imagine that,” Brian said. “You will”—Knotman filled their glasses.

Those from the signals billet were rounded up with clerks, cooks, drivers, and orderlies to fill sandbags. Brian had no confidence in what they were being made to fortify, believing that sooner or later, even if they built a stone wall ten yards high, the whole lot would crumble. But he worked hard and for a long time and, though not particularly tired, knew he was in a fever. Sometimes he spoke a word out loud to isolate the sound of his own voice, and once when he got an exact image of it, had to thrust it away for fear of running insanely towards the sea. Surrounded by many people, he felt entirely alone, worked within the clearly defined circle of his own actions. They had been on the go since seven, with only two breaks, and he dug at the sand mechanically, sometimes getting a light shovel that slewed against the embankment, at others finding the load so heavy that some had to be tipped off. His throat ached for a drink of water, a walk under shady trees to spend a few minutes away from filling sandbags. Those farther along the embankment had the worst of the job since they were in sight of the guard-house and had to keep on working, unable to skive off for a drink now and again, as he had done. The sentries were monuments of perspiration. “What did you say?” Kirkby demanded. “Nothing,” Brian replied; “I must have been thinking aloud.”

Down by the long huts a man walked out of the shower-house, a white towel around his lobster body, slopping his feet along in wet sandals and whistling a Malay love-song popular on Radio Timur. It was an image of clarity, but when it vanished, the aches came back into the bones of Brian’s chest.

The whole thing won’t last much longer, he thought, seeing, even more vividly than Baker’s death, the vision of the aeroplane hanging dead between the trees like an enlarged piece of carcass in a butcher’s shop. It was clearer in his eye than the face of the Communist he had let loose and the ambush later, something he had dreamed around more than once, seeing the plane hanging between tall buildings — a dead whale blocking streets, and suspended also in Serpent Wood, where he used to play in the past that was no longer an unrememberable dream, its broad fuselage tied between trees above the small brook he spent hours trying to dam and divert until, in the dream, the plane fell to the soil and caused him to wake up.

He felt better, his head no longer a battleground. Each spade of sand seemed lighter in weight, and he no longer pitied either the sentries or himself, but enjoyed the hard manual work because the feeling for it had come back into his bones after he had been so long cloistered at the DF hut. Elated and happy, he paused in digging and looked around at the others, saw how much they had slowed down in their exhaustion. The sun didn’t feel harsh to him; trees looked green and cool from a distance, as if even out in the space where he worked they sent some benefit of shade and hidden moisture.

Told to go, he walked off alone through the trees, towards the latrine for a drink and a swill, afterwards to the billet to pick up his eating irons for dinner. The latrine was near the beach and a Malay fisherman walked by with a long net-pole on his shoulder, and over the two-mile water he saw a straggle of grey and black ship in Muong Harbour, and beyond that the colourful line of waterfront buildings looking, he thought, like a row of posh kids’ toys on a window-sill. He stood by the barbed wire, hunger and thirst momentarily forgotten, wondering what he was doing inside this fortress, when so many ships were over there, ready to scatter like funnelled and smoking waterbeetles to all parts of the earth. I call myself Communist, and yet I’m slave-laboured into building these sandbag ramparts to keep them out.

“You’re not a Communist, Brian,” Knotman had said when they got talking politics the other night. “Not from what I know of you, anyway.” “Well, I’m not part of this system, I’ll tell you that.” “I don’t blame you,” Knotman went on, “because I don’t think anybody would be, in their right mind, but most of the world isn’t in its right mind, though I expect it will be one day.” “What do you think I am, then?” Brian asked. “You might be a socialist when you’ve read more and know a bit about it.” “Hitler was a socialist,” Brian laughed, “a national socialist, and I don’t want anything to do with a nut like him.” “He wasn’t a socialist,” Knotman informed him patiently, “he only said he was to deceive the workingman. He was sucking up to big business, and they used him to rob the Jews and stamp on the workingman eventually. They fell for it as well. No, if you’re anything, you’re a socialist-anarchist.” “Maybe,” Brian admitted, but he knew that all men were brothers and that the wealth of the world should be pooled and divided fairly among those who worked, doctors and labourers, architects and mechanics. That’s what those on the other side of the sandbags feel, and even though they might not, as Knotman averred, be true socialists, he was still building up sandbags to keep them out. At least, my eyes have been opened. All I’ve got to do now is learn to see with them, and when one person sees, maybe the next one will as well. “It’s a matter of time,” Knotman said, “before the world unites, not only the workers, either. It’s taking the long way round to get there at the moment,” he laughed, “but that’s a thing that often happens.” “Don’t you think you should do something about it, though, to help it?” Brian persisted. “Yes, but no more than you can without being untrue to yourself. History is on our side, so just bide your time: you won’t even know when to act; the first thing you know, you’ll be acting — and in the right way.” Brian found these words unsatisfactory to his nature, because in the jungle the Communists had acted and he’d seen it with his own eyes, felt their bullets spinning and travelling around him.

He met Mimi at the Egyptian Café the evening before his train left. They sat by the trellis work, next door to crickets and bullfrogs: “Every café has a café of insects and animals around it,” he laughed, spinning the miniature glass of neat gut-rot round in the palm of his hand. He shivered at the coldness of the meeting, thinking how much better it would have been had they, through some accurate and supersensitive whim, decided half an hour ago to stand each other up — for old times’ sake.

She wore neither lipstick nor make-up, had her hair tied back to show for the first time how long she’d been letting it grow in the last few weeks. “I didn’t want to come,” she said, “but I couldn’t help it.”

“Neither could I,” he said. “I feel a rotter, a black-headed no-good bastard.”

“Why?”—her dark eyes opening wide.

“Because I’m leaving you when I don’t want to. There’s a boat waiting to take me eight thousand miles and I’m not dead keen on going the same way.”

“That’s silly.”

“It isn’t. I don’t want to go. But I’ve got no will-power not to go. I want to stay here with you. But I know I shan’t. I’m going to do something I don’t want to do.”

“Everybody has to do that sometime or other. It won’t be the first time for you, either. Nor the last.”

“No,” he said, sending a hot needle of whisky down his throat. “It won’t, now you come to mention it. Far from it. But I’ve never felt it as keen as this on any of the other times.” Insects spun like needlepoints through the doors and lattices of the ramshackle café, gathered in clouds around strings of bare light-bulbs. Tables around them were loaded with drinks and noisy jokes: the café had at least one fight a month, every second pay-day, often being put out of bounds, or closed down for a time. “I’ve got to go soon,” she said softly, hoping he wouldn’t make her stay, “to get the next ferry. I’m supposed to be working, and if I don’t go I’ll lose my job.”

“I’ll send you them books.” No tremor came into either voice, though he felt a seal of hopelessness pressing against his throat. “That’ll be nice,” she said, “if you mean it.”

“Of course I do. I’ll write as well — letters now and again on a Woolworth’s writing-pad. Who knows what I’ll do? I might even come back in a year — or ten or fifteen years — walk into the Boston Lights and have a couple of dances with you before you know who I am.”

“You won’t,” she said.

“I don’t suppose so.”

“You’ll never leave England again. You’ll be too busy working, and enjoying yourself.”

“Well,” he laughed, “you can’t do both.”

She stood up: “I’ll get a tri-shaw to the ferry.”

They walked to the door, looked for a moment at the dim lines and lights of the road that penetrated the heart-shaped shadows like spears and arrows denoting love, yet with no initials. He held her hand, kissed her on eyes and lips, felt the kiss returned and her hand go around him. “Goodbye, Mimi. Look after yourself.” She hesitated, then turned back to him: “What you told me the other night, about up in the jungle, you were brave. I understood. It was marvellous. You were right not to shoot at them.”

He watched her walk to the nearest rickshaw, saw the dim shadow of her light body bend and set itself in the seat. The feet of the man gathered speed between the shafts, soon beyond the range at which Brian, watching from the doorway, could hear. In place of it, another and louder sound, stranger to him yet too real as soon as it was felt, swept over him, a sea from the back of his throat as he turned and walked in the opposite direction.

All day the train took him through familiar landscapes, leaping at first like a straight-lined arrow between rice fields and by the edges of swamps, then towards mountains, twisting and turning like the illustrations of alternating-current theories on the blackboard at radio school. The beautiful names of the country were lit up in the store-rooms of his memory: KEDAH, KELANTAN, PERAK, TRENG-GANU, PAHANG, SELANGOR, NEGRI SEMBILAN — rhythmed out to the thudding self-assurance of stream-driven wheels, an antidote and agreeable opposite to deep jungle rolling beneath waterclouds on mountain tops, and fortified bungalows on village outskirts. The clean, beautifully rounded train wheels were taking him towards Kuala Lumpur in the evening, the big city from which the sun would sink at half-past seven, just as it had twenty-four hours earlier beyond Pulau Timur, when he had watched it from the billet door before going off to see Mimi.

The passing jungle absorbed him, made his mind as blank as if he were drinking water from a stream he wasn’t sure he would see again, so that it was only when he turned his eyes back to the carriage and noticed his webbing and pack straps spilling over the rack and swinging from the regular kick of the train that the fact of his having left Mimi for good rushed into him. Now that the journey had begun he couldn’t get out of the country quick enough, yet his goodbye to her numbed him, rendered him unable to dissect to the bare bones an anguish he knew was useless but that stayed much of the journey with him. Towards dusk, however, the previous fire had left little for his pain to grip on, and Mimi was almost as far apart from him as Pauline had been when he had first danced with Mimi at the Boston Lights over a year ago. As the train drew near to Kuala Lumpur, he felt he had seen the last of her and of Malaya, and sensed the doors of its vivid beauty closing themselves in the immense distance and depth of mountains behind. He sat motionless, apart from the rest of the demob party, gave himself up to the grief of a slow half-swept amputation that grew to hard misery because he did not know to what exactly he was saying goodbye, and hadn’t yet realized the vastness of the other part of his life still to be lived.

At Kuala Lumpur they gathered their kit to cross the dismal platforms towards the night train for Singapore. A transport sergeant stopped Brian and demanded to know where his rifle was. “I haven’t got one.”

“Sergeant, when you address me,” came the barked refrain.

“Sergeant,” he said.

“No one is allowed to travel on the night train without a rifle,” he stipulated. The group of them stood around, awaiting the issue. “I don’t care whether I get on the train or not,” Brian said. You dead-gut, you gestapo-eyed gett, you flap-mouthed effing scumpot.

“You what?”—the fierce face was stuck towards him, smelling of sweat and carbolic soap and sucked-out fags. “Listen,” he said, “for your information, the train going down last night got machine-gunned.”

“We had to hand our rifles in at Kota Libis, sergeant.”

“They’d no bloody right, then. You’d better wait here till I see what’s to be done with you.” He marched to the head of the platform and conferred with an officer. “We’ll miss the blinding boat now,” Jack cursed. “I can see it.”

“They can stuff their rifles,” Brian said. “Next time, I turn mine against that fuckpig — if he’s on the train and we get ambushed, he’d better watch out. By Christ, I mean it. Still, if I don’t get him, maybe the bandits will — one of these days.”

“No such luck,” Kirkby said. “It’s poor bastards like Baker who stop it first. They never get the right ones.”

“Workers of the world, unite!” Jack shouted. “Let’s get on that bloody train.”

The sergeant didn’t look like coming back, so Brian loaded his kit aboard, followed by the others. Each secured a bunk, debouched again to besiege an ice-cream trolley for the night’s supplies.

The train set out, rattling away into the darkness of the wastelands. Brian undressed and climbed into his top bunk, pulling the sheet over him. Some of the others were already asleep, empty ice-cream cartons rolling about the gangway, knocking from side to side like worn-out bobbins at a cotton mill, the ones that had often poured from the backs of lorries on the tips, far away in a half-forgotten world. Sleep seemed impossible, and he lay on his back staring at the ceiling a few inches above his forehead. I’d rather be in bed at home, he thought, with Pauline, and soon will be. I’ll get off the troop-ship in three weeks and get demobbed the next day, will take a flying train down to Nottingham and a taxi to Aspley and — Where will we be that night? Will it be the Barleycorn or the Beacon for a good drink of mild, a laugh and a long talk, a few kisses when we think nobody’s looking?

I’ll see mam and dad as well. Look, dad, I’m back, I’m out of jail, finished, free, paid-up, and ready for a hard job at the factory. Pauline, go and buy me a couple of pairs of overalls, an old jacket and a mashcan, a good pair of boots to keep the suds and steel-shavings out. What number bus do I need to get there spot on at half-past seven every morning? Don’t try and tell me; I was born knowing it. Do you still work in the same shop, dad, carting steel rammel away on that barrow from them auto machines? Is that big bloke with a cauliflower nose still your shop-steward and does he bring the Worker in still every day? Tell him to put me down for the union as well. It’ll be good to meet my old school pals again, back from their own jail sentences by now, I should think: Jim Skelton and Albert, Colin and Dave. Bert as well, when the loon gets finished with the further three years he had, after all, signed on for. He’d go sometime and see Ada and his uncle Doddoe, get a plate of stew and a slab of cake, and listen to Doddoe’s nostalgic curses as he recounted his new adventures as a gaffer down the newly nationalized pit, or told of hair-raising escapades on his recently acquired high-powered motorbike.

I’ll bump into other pals as I charge across to the canteen for my dinner. Or maybe I wain’t bother with the canteen but will go home to mam’s, round the corner and up the street, along the yards and clobbering into the back door. “Hey up, mam,” I’ll shout from the lavatories: “’Ave yer mashed?” “Ay, Brian, my owd duck,” she’ll shout: “I ev an’ all.” And at night I’ll get on the bus back to Pauline, out with the charging mass into fog or sleet (or maybe sunshine, if I’m lucky, though Malaya’s spoilt me for life in that way), smelling the fresh warmth of our room a mile before I get to it, the smell of her powder and kisses as I put my arm around her by the door and pinch her in the right places, dodging out of her way before she tries to crack me one. Over my snap I’ll maybe tell her about the paint and wallpaper I’m thinking of buying, because somebody’s got to get the house fixed up now that Mullinder’s a long time gone, and I’ll be just the bloke for that. I remember the cistern in the bathroom was going rusty before I left and I’m sure nobody’s done much to it, so I’ll start on that first. After tea I’ll be out in the dark rain-soaked streets, passing the beer-offs and fish-and-chip shops with a fag at the slope, smarmed up in my best and heading for the pub to play darts and sup pints with Johnny and Ernie and Arthur, Nan and the rest of them. I’ll spend a night or two helping the union, you can bet, because somebody’s got to do it, and I feel I’m just the bloke for a thing like that. I’ll get to know what’s what as well, pull a few more books into the house to see what makes the world tick, maybe read some of those I nicked years ago. I ain’t let the bastards grind me down in the air force, and I wain’t let them get a look in at grinding me down outside; in fact, if I ’ave owt to do with it, the boot’ll be on the other foot.

His thought swung from this to a vivid and agreeable picture flashed back from the forgotten train journey when he was on his way into Nottingham for his embarkation leave. He stood in the corridor kneeing his pack and kitbag towards the door, and as the train rolled over the Trent, he saw below on its banks a youth and girl casually looking up at the bridge, his arm over her shoulder as if they had left off kissing to see the train over, and would kiss again as soon as it was out of sight.

While the train rattled him down through Malaya, he couldn’t get to sleep so he thought mainly of Pauline and the long-since-gone aura of their courting days, which he hoped would come back to them a while when he got demobbed and home. A daylight yet dim picture of the Cherry Orchard (now covered in houses, she had written) came back to him, bringing with it a stronger feeling of Pauline than any other scene from Nottingham. He smelt the damp soil and grass blades at the end of a summer day when they had wandered there after meeting at the factory, remembered touching the ground before spreading his mac in one of the hollows for them to lie on when dusk came to hide them from anybody’s view. He smelt her body as he opened her coat, as she lay beneath him, sometimes guiding his hand in the urgency of her desire, and the great feeling of loving completeness with which they went on embracing each other afterwards, and then the smell of smoke commingling from their cigarettes and mixing with the odours of soil and darkness. This vision was strong and weak, came to him like beautiful music pianoed from some distant broadcasting station thousands of miles across the empty and landless ocean, indistinct and varying in loudness, from booming to nothing, but with the thread forever kept whole in the mind that was attuned to it.

Turning through the jungle, the train sloughed off tunnels like a magic snake and sent its wood-sparks into the limitless air of the tiger-night. His pillow was heavy as lead from sweat, the sheets cold. There seemed to be no ventilation, and he felt as if he were being killed by a nightmare, a storm of past and present rolling loose, unhinged by the transition taking place. He told himself that Malaya was already left behind, that in the morning when it was light he would be off the peninsula and in the catch-net of Singapore. The long dream of sunshine was behind him; jungle mountains were fur-backed sleeping monsters taking their rightful place in the past. He had made his last foray into the jungle — the Malayan jungle, anyway — and sent his final rhythmical morse phrases into the last blood-flecked sunset over Pulau Timur. Yet there was a feeling of heartbreak about leaving it all.

In the morning, he thought, as he fell off at last towards sleep, the boat will roll from Singapore, and I suppose there’ll be a Highland band playing bagpipes as we draw away. Looking back, and looking forward, he somehow felt he had the key to the door, especially when next year’s birthday seemed already near enough for his hand to reach. (If you lived to be twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two — or a year older than you were at the moment, till your next birthday, in fact — then you were immortal and indestructible.) And with the key to the door all you need do now, he smiled with an irony that made his heart constrict, was flex your labouring muscles to open it; though I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t take more than half as long again.