Saint Jack

1

IN ANY MEMOIR it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject’s nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this! But writing is made with the fingers, and all writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flapping on the clothespin of his exclamation mark. Including the sentence scribbled above: being slow to disclose my nature is characteristic of me. So I am not off to such a bad start after all. My mutters make me remember. Later, I will talk about my girls.

I was going to get under way with an exchange which took place one morning last year between Gopi and me. Gopi was our peon—pronounced “pyoon,” messenger, to distinguish him from “pee-on,” the slave. He was a Tamil and had a bad leg. He sidled into my cubicle. He showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes and said, “Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack in a hurry-lah.”

That summons was the beginning. At the time I did not know enough to find it dramatic. In fact, it annoyed me. Though it seems an innocent request, when it is repeated practically every day for fourteen years it tends to swaddle one with oppression. That “hurry-lah” stung me more than the summons. Mr. Hing, my towkay, my boss, was an impatient feller. I was a sitting duck for summonses.

“No one tells Jack Flowers to hurry,” I said, turning back to my blue desk diary. I was resolute. I entered a girl’s name beside a circled day. He can whistle and wait, I thought, the bugger. “Gopi, tell him I’m busy.”

Carrying that message made the peon liable to share the blame. I suspected that was why I said it — not a cheering thought. But I couldn’t go straight up to Mr. Hing. Gopi left slowly, dragging his bad leg after him. When he was gone I slammed my diary and then, as if stricken with grief, and sighing on each rung, I mounted the narrow stepladder to Mr. Hing’s office.

Mr. Hing, a clean tubby Cantonese, got brutal haircuts, one a week, the sort given to inmates of asylums, leaving him a bristly pelt of brush on top and the rest shaven white. He had high Chinese eyebrows and his smile, not really a smile, showed a carved treasure of gold teeth. His smile was anger. He was angry half the time, with the Chinese agony, an impulsive bellyaching Yin swimming against a cowardly Yang: the personality in deadlock. So the Chinese may gaze with waxen placidity into your face, or refuse to reply, or snort and fart when you want a word of encouragement. The secrecy is only half the story. In the other half they yell and fling themselves from rooftops, guzzle weed killer and caustic soda and die horribly to inconvenience their relatives, or gibber in the street with knives — Chinese fire drill. What kept Mr. Hing from suicide was perhaps the thought that he couldn’t kill himself by jumping from the crenelated roof of his low two-story shophouse. The two opposing parts of his nature made him a frugal but obsessive gambler, a tyrannical philanthropist, a tortured villain, almost my friend. He had a dog. He choked it with good food and kicked it for no reason — he may have kicked it because he fed it, the kindness making him cruel. When it ran away, which was often, Mr. Hing placed an expensive ad in the Straits Times to get the poor beast back. Mr. Hing was short, about my own age, and every morning he did exercises called burpees in his locked office. He had few pleasures. Until six in the evening, when he changed into striped pajamas and dandled his grandson on his knee, he wore an ordinary white shirt, an expensive watch, plain trousers, and cheap rubber sandals he kicked off when he sat cross-legged on his chair. He was seated that way the morning I entered his office.

He was slightly more agitated than usual, and the appearance of agitation was heightened by a black fan on a shelf moving its humming face from side to side very rapidly and disturbing the clutter of papers on his desk. Papers trembled and rose, and Mr. Hing clapped them flat as the fan turned away; then it happened again, another squall, another slap.

Mr. Hing’s brother perched beside him in a crouch, his knees drawn up, his arms folded into the trough of his lap. He was wearing a T-shirt, the collar stretched showing his hairless chest, and large khaki shorts. I thought of him as Little Hing; he was skinnier and younger, and his youthful hungry face made him seem to me most untrustworthy. Together, their faces eight inches apart, staring at me from behind the desk, they resembled the pair of fraternal faces you see fixed in two lozenge-shaped frames on a squareshouldered bottle of Chinese patent medicine, Tiger Tonic, Three Legs Brain Fluid, or (Mr. Hing’s favorite) Rhino Water. Big Hing was especially agitated and saying everything twice: “Sit down, sit down,” then, “We got a problem, got a problem.”

True Chinese speech is impossible to reproduce without distraction, and in this narrative I intend to avoid the conventional howlers. The “flied lice” and “No tickee, no shirtee” variety is really no closer to the real thing than the plain speech I have just put in Big Hing’s mouth. Chinese do more than transpose r and I, and v and b, and s and sh. They swallow most of their consonants and they seldom give a word an ending: a glottal stop amputates every final syllable. So what Big Hing really said was, “Shi’ duh’” and “We go’ a pro’luh’”; there is no point in being faithful to this yammering. Little Hing’s English was much better than Big’s, though Little spoke very fast; but when they were in the same room, Little didn’t open his trap, except to mutter in Cantonese. That morning he sat in silence, his teeth locked together, the lowers jutting out, fencing the uppers with yellow pickets.

The conversation, I knew, would be brief, and the only reason Big Hing asked me to sit down was that I towered over the desk like a sweaty bear, panting with annoyance, my tattoos showing. My size bothered them especially. I was a foot taller than Big Hing, and a foot and a half taller than Little — when they were standing. I sat and sank into a chair of plastic mesh, and as I was sinking Big Hing started to explain.

A month before, he had been told that a man was coming from Hong Kong to audit our books. There was another Hing in Hong Kong, a towkay bigger than Big Hing, and the auditing was an annual affair. It was also an annual humiliation because Big Hing didn’t like his accounts questioned. Still, it happened every year. At one time it was a sallow little man who always arrived ravaged from traveling deck class on a freighter; then, for a few years, a skeletal soul with a kindly smile and popping eyes, who hugged a briefcase — turned to suede by wear — to his starched smock with frog buttons. The auditors stayed for a week, snapping the abacus and thumbing the ledger; Big Hing sat close by, pouring tea, saying nothing. Last year it was a man called Lee, and he was the problem, though Big Hing didn’t say so. All he said was: meet this man at the airport.

It was why Hing was agitated. He assumed Lee was Cantonese or at least Chinese. But he discovered, I never learned how, that Lee was an ang moh, a redhead. The ang mohs were my department. It was the reason I was employed by Hing—Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioned, as the shop sign read. Hing was peeved that he was mistaken about the name, and furious that his books were going to be scrutinized by an ang moh. He beamed with anger and banged his fist down upon the fluttering papers, repeating Lee’s name and my orders to meet him at the airport. I drew my own conclusions, and I was correct in every detail except the spelling, which was Leigh.

“My car’s at the garage,” I said. I was not being difficult. It was a noisy ten-year-old Renault with 93,000 miles on the clock. One wheel, the front right, had come unstuck from the chassis and made the front end shimmy at any speed, a motion that rubbed the tread from the tires. “I’ll have to take a taxi.”

“Can, can,” said Big Hing.

Little Hing whispered something, staring at me, keeping his teeth locked, a coward’s ventriloquism. For Little Hing I was the ultimate barbarian: my hair was once reddish, I am hairy, my arms are profusely tattooed — a savage, “just out of the trees,” as Yardley used to say.

“Bus to airport, taxi to town,” said Big Hing. That was Little’s whispered suggestion.

It was a two-dollar taxi fare; the bus was forty cents. There was no direct bus. I hated sitting at an out-of-town bus shelter, in the heat, with twenty schoolchildren. But I said okay because I could see Big Hing’s anger makes him determined that I should save one-sixty and know who was boss. I didn’t start arguments I knew in advance I was going to lose. Big Hing was my towkay: I couldn’t win. But my dealings with him were small.

He counted out $2.40 from petty cash and looked at his watch.

“What time is his plane due in?” I asked.

Big Hing thought three-thirty; Little murmured in Cantonese, and I expected an amendment, but Big stuck to three-thirty and gave me the flight number. I went down to consult my bus guide.

So far it had been an unpleasant day, ruined first by the peon telling me to hurry and second by the command to take the bus all the way out to the airport. After looking at the bus guide I saw that several things were in my favor. I was right about there being no direct bus, but the 18-A Singapore Traction Company bus passed by Moulmein Green. I could have lunch at home for a change, and if I hurried, a quick nap. The transfer would have to be made on Paya Lebar Road — a stroke of luck: I could see if Gladys was available before continuing on the 93 to the airport. None of this would cost a penny extra; out of two humiliations I had rescued a measure of self-respect. And if Gladys was free and Leigh was interested I stood to make nine dollars. In any event, I was anxious to meet him. It was nice to see a new face, and an ang moh’s was more welcome than most. We were lonelier than we admitted to; after many years of residence in Singapore, we all went for the mail twice a day, even Yardley and Smale, who never got any.

This is the beginning of my story, and already I can see that it represents my fortunes more faithfully, in the haphazard recollection of a single morning’s interruption, than if I had planned it as carefully as I once intended and began with the rumbling factual sentence I used to repeat to myself in the days when I believed my early life mattered, before I went away — about being born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians; and then the part about my earliest memory (the warm room, my wet thumb and velvet cushion, my father singing with the opera on the radio). There is no space for that here.

2

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, lowering myself on a rope from the rusty stern of the Allegro, anchored then in the Straits of Malacca (“the financial straits,” Yardley said), I did not think I was an old man — though if anyone had insisted I was old I would have believed him. Most people are willing to make fools of themselves with a little persuasion, and the question of age is answered by the most foolishness. Now I know that old and young make little difference: the old man talks easily to a child.

They say every age is more barbarous than the last. It is possible. If there is an error in the statement it doesn’t matter, because the people who say this are either very young or very old, just starting out and with no experience, or musing in life’s sundowner with false flickers of half-forgotten memories. The age, as they call it, is too big to see, but they have time on their hands: it is too early for one and too late for the other to worry about being wrong. What they don’t know is that however awful the age is, it is placid and hopeful compared to a certain age in a man.

Fifty: it is a dangerous age — for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn on the lights because he’ll see the cockroaches he smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new — he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he’s balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack. He’s feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He’s neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle — that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.

That was how I recognized Mr. Leigh, the man they sent from Hong Kong to audit our books. I knew his name and his flight number — nothing else. I waited at Gate Three and watched the passengers file through Health and Immigration. First the early birds, the ones who rush off the plane with briefcases, journalists and junior executives with Chinese girl friends, niftily dressed, wearing big sunglasses; then the two Chinese sisters in matching outfits; a lady with a little boy and further back her husband holding the baby and juggling his passport; a pop group with blank faces and wigs of frizzy hair, looking like a delegation from New Guinea, anxious to be met; the missionary priest with a goatee and a cheroot, addressing porters in their own language; a few overdressed ones, their Zurich topcoats over their arms. Lagging behind, a lady in a wheelchair about whom people say, “Lord, I don’t know how she does it,” a man with a big box, a returning student with new eyeglasses, and. Mr. Leigh. I knew him as soon as I set eyes on him: he was the only one who looked remotely like me.

He was red-faced and breathless; and, unaccustomed to the heat, he was mopping his face with a hanky. He was a bit heavier than he should have been — his balance was wrong, his clothes too small. I waved to him through the glass doors. He nodded and turned away to claim his suitcase. I went into the men’s room, just to look in the mirror. I was reassured by my hair, not white like Leigh’s and still quite thick. But I wished I had more hair. My face was lined: my nap had made me look older. I was disheveled from the bus ride and looked more rumpled than usual because I had rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs. It was my tattoos. I hid them from strangers. Strangers’ eyes fix on tattoos as they fix on scars in unlikely places. A person spots a tattoo and he has you pegged: you’re a sailor, or you do some sort of poorly paid manual labor; one day you got drunk with your friends and they got tattooed, and to be one of the gang so did you. It did not happen this way with me, but that is the only version strangers know of a tattooing.

Mr. Leigh was just pushing through the glass doors as I came back from the toilet smoothing my sleeves. I said hello and tried to take his suitcase. He wouldn’t let go; he seemed offended that I should try to help. I knew the feeling. He was abrupt and wheezing and his movements tried to be quick. It is usually this way with people who have just left a plane: they are overexcited in a foreign place, their rhythm is different — they are attempting a new rhythm — and they are not sure what is going to happen next. The sentence they have been practicing on the plane, a greeting, a quip, they know to be inappropriate as soon as they say it. Leigh said, “So they didn’t send the mayor.” Then, “You don’t look Chinese to me.”

I suggested a beer in the lounge.

“What time are they expecting me?” he asked. He had just arrived and already he was worried about Hing. I knew this man: he didn’t want to lose his job or his dignity; but it is impossible to keep both.

“They weren’t too sure what time your plane was coming in,” I said. We both knew who “they” were. He put down his suitcase.

One reason I remember the first conversation I had with Mr. Leigh (or William, as he insisted I call him, but I found this more formal than Mister; he didn’t reply to “Bill”) is that I had the same conversation with every ang moh I met in Singapore. We were in the lounge having a beer, sharing a large Anchor; every few minutes the loud-speakers became noisy with adenoidal announcements of arrivals and departures in three languages. Leigh was still keyed up and he sat forward in his chair, taking quick gulps of beer and then staring into his glass.

I asked about the flight and the weather in — William being English, I attempted some slang—“Honkers.” This made him look up from his glass and squint straight at me, so I gave up. And was it a direct flight? No, he said, it landed for fueling at Bangkok.

“Now that’s a well-named place!” I said and grinned. I can’t remember whether it got a rise out of him. I asked if he had a meal on the plane.

“Yes,” he said, “perfectly hideous.”

“Well, that food is always so damned hideous,” I said, trying to sound more disgusted than him. The word stuck to my tongue. I wasn’t telling the truth. I thought airplane food was very good, always the correct color and each course in its own little covered trough on the tray, the knives and forks wrapped up and all the rest of the utensils in clean envelopes and in fitted slots and compartments. I had to agree the food was hideous. He was a guest, and I had plans for him.

The next thing I said to him was what I said to everyone who came through. I said it slowly, with suggestive emphasis on the right syllables: “If there’s anything you want in Singapore, anything at all”—I smiled here—“just let me know and I’ll see what I can fix up.”

He replied, as most strangers did — but he was not smiling—“I’m sure you don’t mean anything.”

“Anything.” I took a drink of my beer to show I wasn’t going to qualify the promise.

He mopped his face. “I was wondering—”

And I knew what he was wondering. The choice wasn’t large, but people didn’t realize that. A tout could follow a tourist on the sidewalk and in the space of a minute offer everything that tourist could conceivably want. The touts who didn’t know English handed over a crudely printed three-by-five card to the man with a curious idle face. The card had half a dozen choices on it: blue movies, girls, boys, exhibition, massage, ganja — a menu which covered the whole appetite of longing. No new longings were likely, and the tout who breathed, “You want something special?” had in mind a combination based on the six choices.

Leigh was perspiring heavily. Vice, I was thinking: it sounded like what it was, it squeezed, expressing the grape of fantasy. Gladys was free. It was possible to stop off at her place on the way back from the airport — Leigh would appreciate the convenience — and I was going to say so. But it is a mistake to make explicit suggestions: I discovered that very early. If I suggested a girl and the feller wanted a boy he would be ashamed to admit it and the deal would be off. It was always wrong to offer an exhibition — like saying, “You can’t cut the mustard but how about watching?”—and if a person was thinking of having a go he would refuse if I suggested it. Most people thought their longings were original, but they weren’t: they could only be one of six, or else a combination. Various as fantasy, but fantasy didn’t allow for the irregular performance of man’s engine. I knew the folly of expectation, and how to caution a feller against despairing of his poor engine and perhaps hitting his pecker with a hammer.

I sized up Leigh as he was blotting his cheeks and pulling at his collar, counting the whirring fans in the lounge. I took him to be an exhibition man, with a massage to follow — not an ordinary massage, something special, Lillian jumping naked on his spine. Intimacy, as the girls called it, or boochakong, to use the common Chinese term I preferred to the English verb, would still be a strong possibility, I was thinking. There was no such thing as impotence: it was successful as soon as money changed hands. It wasn’t the money, but the ritual.

“What do you say?” I asked, as brightly as I could. Usually it wasn’t so hard; when it was, it meant the feller was worried about asking for something I couldn’t provide.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and drew a deep breath. So I was wrong about the exhibition, and just as well, I thought; I hated those monkeyshines. I guessed Leigh was slightly bent; his particular crimp was a weakness for transvestites, of which, as is well known, there is a whole sorority in Singapore. Very few fellers admitted to this yen; they were the hardest ones to handle, but over the years I had seen how they reacted to the Chinese boys who in skirts were more winsome than girls. Middle age may be an emergence of this comfort, too, a fling at play-acting with a pretty boy, a reasonable occasion for gaiety, the surprise of costuming and merry vestments. If I detected the wish I took the fellers down to Bugis Street and steeered them over to the reliable ones, Tiny or Gina. Lucy had the operation which sometimes disappointed the fellers. Your bashful fruit pretended he was talking to a girl, but just so we knew where we stood I said, “Take Gina — he’s a very nice feller.” The client looked surprised and said, “You mean—?” And then: “I might as well take him home — I’m too drunk to notice the difference,” and going out would slip me ten dollars.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Leigh.

A very uncommon question. I was going to say nothing, just keep smiling in a willing fashion. But he looked as though he meant it and wouldn’t tumble to my willingness.

I said, “I thought… if you were interested in anything illegal, hyah-yah, I might be able to—”

“Illegal?” said Leigh and put his hanky down. He leaned over and, puzzled and interested, asked, “You mean a prostitute?”

I tried to laugh again, but the expression on his face turning from puzzlement to disgust rattled me. It had been a mistake to say anything.

“No,” I said, “of course not.” But it came too late, my tardy denial only confirmed the truth, and Leigh was so indignant — he had straightened up and stopped drinking — that shame, unfamiliar as regret, tugged at my neck hairs. Through the glass-topped table in front of me I could see I was curling my toes and clawing at my sandals.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll call a taxi.” I started to get up. I was hot; I wanted to roll up my sleeves, now damply stuck to my tattoos, revealing them.

“Flowers,” he said, and narrowed his eyes at me, “are you a ponce?”

“Me? Hyah-mn! What a thing to say!” It was a loud hollow protest with a false echo. Prostitute, he had said, pimp, whore, queer, ponce — words people use to name the things they hate (liking them they leave them nameless, the human voice duplicating the suspicion that passion is unspeakable). “I’m a sort of pornocrat,” I was going to say, to mock him. I decided not to. His incredulity was a prompting for me to lie.

The waitress passed by.

Leigh said, “Wan arn!” greeting her in vilely accented Mandarin.

“Scuse me?” she said. She took a pad from the pocket of her dress, a pencil from her hair. “Anudda Anchor?”

“Nee hao ma,” said Leigh. He had turned away from me and was looking at the girl. But the girl was looking at me “Nee hway bu hway—”

“Mister,” said the girl to me, “what ship your flend flom?”

Leigh cleared his throat and said we’d better be going. In the taxi he said hopelessly, “I was wondering if I might get a chance to play a little squash.”

“Sure thing,” I said, pouncing. “I can fix that up for you in a jiffy.” Squash? He was wheezing still, and red as a beet. Carrying his suitcase to the taxi rank he kept changing hands and groaning, and then he put his face out the taxi window and let the breeze blow into his mouth, taking gulps of it the way dogs do in a car. He had swallowed two little white pills with his beer. He looked closely at his palms from time to time. And he wanted to play squash!

“What’s your club, Flowers?”

We had agreed that I was to call him William if he called me Jack. I liked my nursery-rhyme name. Now I felt he was cheating.

“Name it,” I said, and to remind him of our agreement I added, “William.”

I had an application pending at the Cricket Club once, or at least the “Eggs,” two elderly bald clients of mine, who were members, said I did. I had been trying to join a club in Singapore for a long time. Then it was too late. I couldn’t apply for membership without giving myself away, for I often drank in the clubs and most of the members — they knew me well — thought I had joined years before. There wasn’t a club on the island I couldn’t visit one way or another. I had clients at all of them.

“Cricket Club’s got some squash courts, but the Tanglin’s just put up new ones — you may want to have a look at those. There’s none at the Swimming Club so far, though we’ve got a marvelous sauna room.” I thumped his knee. “We’ll find something, William.”

“Sounds very agreeable,” he said, pulling his head back into the taxi. He was calm now. “How do you manage three clubs? I’m told the entrance fees are killing.”

“They are pretty killing,” I said, using his dialect again, “but I reckon it’s worth it.”

“You’re not a squash player yourself?”

“No,” I said, “I’m just an old beachcomber — drinking’s my sport, nyah!”

That made him chuckle; I was laughing too, and as I shifted on the seat I felt a lump in my back pocket press into my butt: two thick envelopes of pornographic pictures I had brought along just in case he asked. Their reminding pressure stopped my laughing.

The taxi driver tilted his head back and said, “Bloomies? Eshbishin wid two gull? You want boy? Mushudge? What you want I get. What you like?”

“Just a game of squash, driver, thank you very much,” I said in a pompous fruity voice to this poor feller for the benefit of the horse’s ass next to me. Then I smiled at William and tried to tip him a wink, but his head was out the window and he was blinking and gulping at the breeze and probably wondering what he was doing on that tedious little island.

3

I WALKED into a bar where they did not know me well and I could hear the Chinese whispers: “Who does that jackass think he is?” And then it ceased; my face made silence. It was not the face you expected in Ho’s or Toby’s or the Honey Bar, in the Golden Treasure or Loon’s Tip-Top. Years ago I had not minded, but later my heart sank on the evenings all my regulars were tied up and I had to go into these joints recruiting. I got stares from round-shouldered youths sitting with plump hostesses; and the secret society members watched me — in Ho’s the Three Dots, in the Honey Bar the Flying Dragons. There was no goblin as frightening as a member of a secret society staring me down. He first appeared to have no eyes, then the slits became apparent and I guessed he was peering at me from somewhere behind the slits. I never saw the eyes. The slits didn’t speak; and it was impossible to read the face, too smooth for a message. I turned away and slipped the manager a few dollars to release the girl, and when I was hurrying out I heard growls and grunts I didn’t understand, then titters. On the sidewalk I heard the whole bar crackle and explode into yelling laughter. Now they had eyes; but I was outside.

One night a thug spoke to me. He was sitting up front at the bar eating a cold pork pie with his fingers. He was wearing the secret society uniform, a short-sleeved shirt with the top four buttons undone, sunglasses — though it was dark — and his hair rather long, with wispy wing-tufts hanging past his ears. I didn’t think he saw me talking to the manager, and after I passed the money over and turned to go the thug put his hand on my shoulder, and rubbing pork flakes into it, said gruffly, “Where you does wuck?”

I didn’t answer. I hurried down the gloomy single aisle of the bar, past eerily lit Chinese faces. The thug called out, “Where you wucking!” That was in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, and I never went near it again.

Who is he? they murmured in the Belvedere, the Hilton, the Goodwood when I was in the lobby flicking through a magazine, waiting for one of my girls to finish upstairs. I could have passed for a golf pro when I was wearing my monogrammed red knit jersey — the one with long sleeves — and my mustard-colored slacks and white ventilated shoes. No one knew I had a good tan because I worked for Hing, who refused to pay for taxis in town and who sent me everywhere, but always to redheads, with parcels. In my short-sleeved flowered batik shirt, with my tattoos displayed, they took me for a beachcomber with a private income or a profitable sideline, perhaps “an interesting character.” Once, in the Pebble Bar of the Hotel Singapura, an American lady who was three sheets to the wind said I looked like a movie actor she knew, but she couldn’t think of his name.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

I smiled, to give her the impression that I might be that actor, said, “Take a guess, sweetheart,” and then I left; leaving, I heard some hoots, from the gang of oil riggers who always drank there, and I knew who they were hooting at.

My appearance, this look of a millionaire down on his luck, which is also the look of a bum attempting to be princely, was never quite right for most of the places I had to go. I was the wrong color in the Tai-Hwa and all the other Chinese joints — that was clear; at the Starlight, strictly Cantonese, they seated me with elderly hostesses and overcharged me. I was too dressy for the settler hangouts and never had enough money for more than one drink at the Hilton or Raffles, though I looked as if I might have belonged in those hotels. I certainly looked like a member of the Tanglin Club, the Swiss Club, the Cricket Club, and all the others where my chits were signed for me by fellers who liked my discretion. I was always welcome in the clubs, but that was a business matter. And they did not laugh at the Bandung: they knew me there.

In the taxi I mentioned the Bandung to Leigh; he didn’t say no, but he thought we should stop at Hing’s first—“Let’s have a look at the towkay” was what he said. We got stuck in rush-hour traffic, a solid unmoving line of cars. There was an accident up front, and the cars were passing the wrecked sedan at a crawl to note down the license number so they could play it on the lottery. There was a bus in front of us displaying the bewildering sign I Don’t Know Why, But I Prefer Sanyo. The local phrase for beeping was “horning,” and they were horning to beat the band. We sat and sweated, gagging on the exhaust fumes; it was after five by the time we got to Hing’s.

Little Hing was sitting in the shop entrance reading the racing form. He sat like a roosting fowl, his feet on the seat, his knees drawn up under his chin. Seeing us, he turned his bony face and bawled upstairs, then he locked his teeth and snuffled and paddled the air with his free hand, which meant we were to wait.

“Your Oriental politeness,” I said. “He’ll spit in a minute, probably hock a louie on your shoes, so watch out.”

We had made Big Hing wait; now, to save face, he was making us wait. Hing spent the best part of a day saving face, and Yardley said, “When you see his face you wonder why he bothers.”

Gopi, the peon, brought a wooden stool for Leigh, but Leigh just winced at it and studied Hing’s sign: Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioners, and below that in smaller assured script, Catering & Victualling, Marine Hardware, Importers, Wholesale Drygoods & Foodstuffs, Licensed Agents, Frozen Meat, and the motto, “All Kinds of Deck & Engine Stores & Bonded Stores & Sundries.” “Sundries” was my department. The signs on the shops to the left and right of Hing, and all the other shops — biscuit-colored, peeling, cracked and trying to collapse, a dusty terrace of shophouses sinking shoulder to shoulder on Beach Road — were identical but for the owner’s name; even the stains and cracks were reduplicated down the road as far as you could see. But there was something final in the decline, an air of ramshackle permanency common in Eastern ports, as if having fallen so far they would fall no further.

“What’s your club in Hong Kong?” I asked.

“Just one, I’m afraid,” he said. He paused and smiled. “The Royal Hong Kong.”

“Jockey or Yacht?”

“Yacht,” he said quickly, losing his smile.

Little Hing spat and went back to his racing form without bothering to see where the clam landed.

“Missed again,” I said, winking at Leigh. “I’ve heard the Yacht Club’s a smashing place,” I said, and he looked at me the way he had when I said “Honkers.” “You’re in luck, actually. You have a reciprocal membership with the Tanglin here and probably a couple of others as well.”

“No,” he said, “I inquired about that before I came down. Bit of a nuisance, really. But there it is.”

He was lying. I knew the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club and the Tanglin Club had reciprocal memberships and privileges; a member of one could sign bar chits at the other and use all the club’s facilities. So he was not a member, and there we were standing on the Beach Road sidewalk, on the lip of its smelly monsoon drain, at the beck and call of a surly little towkay who had chosen to sulk upstairs, lying about clubs we didn’t belong to. It made me sad, like the pictures hidden in my back pocket I would never admit to having: two grown men practicing lies, and why?

Big Hing came out in his pajamas and gave Leigh that secret society stare. Hing was not a member; he was a paid-up victim of the Red Eleven, who controlled Beach Road and collected “coffee money” for protection. The payment gave Hing a certain standing, for having victimized him the Red Eleven would stick by him and fight anyone who tried to squeeze him. Leigh handed over a letter, and we waited while Hing gnawed the sealing wax from the flap. He put on his old wire glasses and read the column of characters, then he smiled his angry eyeless smile and nodded at Leigh.

“I trust everything is in order,” said Leigh to Hing.

It was a wasted remark; Hing was muttering to Little Hing, and Little replied by muttering into the racing form he held against his face.

“Where’s our friend going to put up?” I asked.

“Booked at the Strand,” said Big Hing. “Can come tomorrow.” He picked up his grandson and bounced the trouserless little feller to show the interview was over.

The Strand Hotel was on Scotts Road, diagonally across the road from the Tanglin Club. As we were pulling into the Strand’s driveway, under the arch with the sign reading European Cuisine — Weddings — Parties — Reasonable Prices, Leigh saw the Tanglin signboard and said, “Why don’t we pop over for a drink?”

I let my watch horrify me. “God,” I said, “it’s nearly half past six. That place is a madhouse this time of day. Fellers having a drink after work. Look, William, I know a quiet little—”

“I’d love to have a look at those new squash courts of yours,” he said. He hit me hard on the arm and said heartily, “Come on, Flowers, I’ll buy you a drink.” He gave his suitcase to the room-boy at the Strand, signed the register, and then clapped his stomach with two hands. “Ready?”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Leigh, but that was impossible because money was not allowed and only a member could sign chits. The brass plaque on the club entrance — MEMBERS ONLY— mocked us both. I looked for someone I knew, but all I could see were tanned long-legged mothers, fine women in toweling smocks, holding beach bags and children’s hands, waiting for their syce-driven cars after a day at the club pool. They were eagerly whispering to each other, and laughing; the sight of that joy lifted my heart — I couldn’t help but think they were plotting some trivial infidelity.

“The new squash courts are over there,” I said, stepping nimbly past the doorman and bounding up the stairs.

“Drink first,” said Leigh. “I’m absolutely parched.” He was enjoying himself and he seemed right at home. He led the way into the Churchill Room, and “Very agreeable” he said, twice, as he looked for an opening at the bar.

The Churchill Room had just been renovated: thick wall-to-wall carpets, a new photograph of Winston, a raised bar, and a very efficient air-conditioning system. In spite of the cool air I was perspiring, a damp panel of shirt clung to my back; I was searching for a familiar face, someone I knew who might sign a drink chit. The bar was packed with men in white shirts and ties, some wearing stiff planter’s shorts, standing close to the counter in groups of three or four, braying to their companions or sort of climbing over each other and waving chit pads at the barmen. Leigh was pushing ahead of me and I had just reached out to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I had remembered something important — my nerve had failed me so completely I could not think what, and prayed for necessity’s inspiration — when I saw old Gunstone over in the corner at one of the small tables, drinking alone.

Gunstone was one of my first clients; he was in his seventies and came to Singapore when it was a rubber estate and a few rows of shophouses and go-downs. During the war he was captured by the Japanese and put to work on the Siamese Death Railway. He told me how he had buried his friend on the Burmese border, a statement like a motto of hopeless devotion, an obscure form of rescue, I buried my friend. He was the only client who took me to lunch when he wanted a girl, but he was also the cagiest, because I had to make all the arrangements for him and even put my own name on the hotel register. What he did with the girls, I never knew — I never asked: I did not monkey with a feller’s confidence — but it was my abiding fear that one day Gunstone’s engine was going to stop in a hotel room I had reserved, and I was going to have to explain my name in the register. I never saw Gunstone’s wife; he only took her to the club at night and most of my club work was in the daytime.

“Jack,” he said, welcoming me, showing me an empty chair. Good old Gunstone.

“Evening, Mr. Gunstone,” I said. It was a servile greeting, I knew, but I could not see Leigh and I was worried.

Gunstone seemed glad to see me; that was a relief. I feared questions like, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“What’ll you have?” asked Gunstone.

“Small Anchor,” I said, and as Gunstone turned to find a waiter Leigh appeared with a drink in his hand.

“Chappie here wants your signature, Flowers,” said Leigh.

I took the chit pad from the waiter and put it on Gunstone’s table, saying “All in good time,” then introduced Leigh. Gunstone said, “Ever run into old So-and-So in Hong Kong?” and Leigh said charmingly, “I’ve never had the pleasure.” Gunstone began describing the feller, saying, “He’s got the vilest habits and he’s incredibly mean and nasty and—” Gunstone smiled—“perfectly fascinating. He might be in U.K. now, on leave.”

“Do you ever go back to U.K.?” Leigh asked.

“Used to,” said Gunstone. “But the last time I was there they passed a bill making homosexuality legal. I said to my wife, ‘Let’s get out of here before they make the blasted thing compulsory!’”

Leigh laughed. “I meant to ask you, Flowers,” he said, “are you married?”

“Nope,” I said. Leigh went on talking to Gunstone. Once, and it was at the Tanglin Club, I used to fix up a certain feller with girls. The feller was married and I eventually got friendly with the wife, and “She’s ever so nice,” I said to the feller. On the afternoons when he had one of my girls I visited his wife at their house in Bukit Timah and had no fear that he would show up. But there were children; she hollered at them and sent them out with the amah. She was very sweet to me, a moment after she had cuffed the children. One afternoon I was in the Bandung. I had agreed we should meet, but I realized I was late, delaying over a large gin. She was waiting; I was waiting; I did not want to go. It was like marriage. I went on drinking, and lost her.

“I must be going,” said Gunstone. He pulled the chit pads over and signed them. He said, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, and winked.

“Lunch,” said Gunstone. “The usual time, what?”

“Sounds frightfully hush-hush,” said Leigh.

To Gunstone I said, “We were just leaving, too,” which made it impossible for Leigh to object. It was unfair to do this, but I was sore: Leigh’s two gin slings were going to cost me a whole afternoon of waiting in the lobby of a hotel, cooling my heels and worrying about Gunstone’s engine.

Yardley was telling his joke about the Irishman and the love-starved gorilla as we entered the Bandung. We walked over to the bar and, perversely I thought, Yardley delivered the punch line to Leigh, “‘One thing more, sair,’ says O’Flannagan to the zoo keeper, ‘If there’s any issue — any issue at all — it’s got to be raised a Roman Catholic.’”

They started to laugh — Yates, Smale, Frogget, and loudest of all and closing his eyes with mirth, Yardley himself. I smiled, though I had heard it before. Leigh wasn’t amused; he said, “Yes, well.” That was his first mistake in the Bandung, not laughing at Yardley’s joke. Yardley, an old-timer, had been drinking in the Bandung for years, and one day when Yardley was out of the room Frogget said, “Yardley is the Bandung.” Every bar had a senior member; Yardley was ours. Frogget, a large shy feller, balding but not old, was Yardley’s ape. Frogget — Desmond Frogget — ate like a horse, but he was sensitive about his weight; it was considered impolite to remark on the amount of food Frogget ate, the platters of noodles he hoovered up. Frogget could not have been much more than thirty-five, but the ridiculous man had that English knack of assuming elderly biases and a confounding grumpiness that made him seem twice his age. He regretted the absence of clipper ships, he remembered things that happened before he was born and like other equally annoying youths who drank at the Bandung started sentences with “I always” and “I never.”

“Don’t believe we’ve met,” said Yardley, putting his hand out to Leigh.

Leigh hinted at reluctance by frowning as he offered his hand, but the worst offense was that after he said his name he spelled it.

“Been in Singapore long?” asked Smale. Smale was a short, ruddy-faced man whose squarish appearance gave the impression of having been carpentered. He carried a can of mentholated cigarettes with him wherever he went. He was working the cutter on the lid as he asked Leigh the question.

“No,” I said, “he just—”

“To be precise,” said Leigh in a prissy voice, and checking his watch, “four hours and forty-five minutes.”

“We like to be precise around here,” said Yardley, nudging Frogget. “Don’t we, Froggy? I mean, seeing as how we’re all on the slag heap of life, it’s a bloody good thing to know the time of day, what Froggy?”

“I always wear my watch to bed,” said Frogget.

“You come down from K.L.?” Yates asked, seeing Yardley getting hot under the collar.

“Hong Kong,” said Leigh, stressing the Hong the way residents do. He looked around the room, as if trying to locate an exit.

The Bandung was a huge place — in its prime a private house with an elegant garden, birdbath, and sundial and intersecting cobblestone paths. But the garden had fallen to ruin and the trellises had broken under the weight of vines which had become thick, leaning on and pinching the frail trellis ladders. I liked the garden in this wild state, the elastic fig trees strangling the palms, the roots of the white-blossomed frangipanis cracking the stone benches and showing knuckles between the cobblestones. And the vines, now more powerful than the trellises that had once supported them, needed no propping; they made a cool leafy cavern from the walled front entrance to the verandah, where there were pots of orchids hanging from wires, with gawking blossoms and damp dangling roots.

The bar itself stood in what was once a vast parlor, colored glazed tiles on the floor and a ceiling so high there were often some confused swallows flying in circles near the top. The windows were also large and Yardley said a swarm of bees flew in one day, passed over the heads of those drinking at the bar, and flew out the other side without disturbing a soul. The adjoining room we called the “lounge,” where there was a jumble of rattan furniture, a sofa, the piano Ogham used to play, and little tables and potted palms. No one sat there except the barman, Wallace Thumboo, when he was totting up the day’s chits at midnight, sorting them into piles according to the signatures. I was seeing the Bandung now with Leigh’s eyes, and I could understand his discomfort, but I didn’t share it.

“Could use a coat of paint,” Leigh said. “Do I smell cats?” He wrinkled his nose.

“I was in Hong Kong a few years back,” said Yardley. “My towkay sent me up to get some estimates on iron sheeting. I was supposed to stay for a month, until the auction, but after two days I came back. Couldn’t stick the place. They treated me like dirt. Told the towkay the deal was up the spout. Ever been to Hong Kong, Froggy?”

Frogget said yes, it was awful.

“What’s the beer like?” Smale asked Leigh.

“My dear fellow,” said Leigh, “I haven’t the remotest idea.”

That annoyed everyone, and Yardley said, “Got a right one ’ere.” At that point I wasn’t sure who I disliked more — Yardley for being rude to Leigh, or Leigh for spelling his name and saying “I haven’t the remotest idea” to what was meant as a friendly question. The next thing Leigh said put me on Yardley’s side.

“Flowers,” said Leigh sharply, ignoring the others, “I thought you said we could get a drink here.”

This magisterial “Flowers,” in front of my friends. Frogget grinned, Smale winked and raised his glass to me, Yates frowned, and Yardley smirked as if to say, “You poor suffering bastard”—all of this behind Leigh’s stiffened back.

I knocked for Wally and ordered two gins. Leigh wrapped his hanky around his glass and drank disgustedly. It may have been anger or the heat, but Leigh was reddening and beads of sweat began percolating out of his face. Ordinarily, Yardley would have behaved the same as Gunstone and said, “Ever run into old So-and-So in Kowloon?” which might have brought Leigh around. Or he would have told his story about the day the swarm of bees flew through the window, and if he was in a good mood he would have embellished it by imitating the bees, running from one side of the room to the other, flapping his arms, and buzzing until he was breathless.

“Bit stuffy in here,” Smale said.

Yardley was looking at Leigh. Leigh seemed unaware that he had nettled Yardley. Yates said he had to go home and Yardley said, “I don’t blame you.”

“Say good night to Flowers,” said Frogget.

“Mister Flowers to you, Froggy,” I said.

Yates left, saying good night to everyone by name, but omitting Leigh. Leigh said, “Tiffin time — isn’t that what they call it here?”

Yardley had not taken his eyes off Leigh. I thought Yardley might sock him, but his tactic was different. He told his McCoy joke, the one he always told when there was a woman in the bar he wanted to drive out. It concerned four recruits being interviewed for the army. The sergeant asks them what they do for a living and the first one, saying his name’s McCoy, mutters that he’s a cork sacker (“puts the cork into sacks, you see”); the next one, also a McCoy, is a cork soaker (“soaks it in water, you understand”); the third McCoy is a coke sacker (“sacks coke for a dealer in fuel”); and the last one, a mincing feller in satin tights, says that he’s the real McCoy. Yardley told it in several accents, lengthening it with slurs and pauses (“What’s that you say?”), and obnoxiously set it in Hong Kong.

Leigh made no comment. He ordered a gin for himself, but none for me.

“You giving up the booze, Jack?” said Smale, who noticed.

“A double, Wally,” I said.

Yardley giggled. “I must have my tiffin,” he said.

“Tiffin time, breh-heh,” said Frogget.

“Take care of yourself, Jack,” said Yardley, and left with Frogget shambling after him.

“I think I’ll go whore hopping,” said Smale in a thoughtful voice. He pressed down the lid of his cigarette can and said, “Say, Jack, what was the name of that skinny one you fixed me up with? Gladys? Gloria?”

I pretended not to hear.

“Give me her number. God, she was a lively bit of crumpet.” He stared at Leigh and said, “She does marvelous things to your arse.”

“Ask Wally,” I said.

“It was like being dead,” said Smale, still addressing Leigh. He grinned. “You know. Paradise.”

Wally was polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, smiling at the glasses as he smiled at the counter when he wiped it and at the gin bottle when he poured. Wally said, “What you want, Mr. Smale? You want mushudge?” He nodded. “Can.”

“Aw hell,” said Smale. “Maybe I should forget it. I could have another double whiskey, toss myself off in the loo, and go down to the amusement park and play the pinball machines. What do you think?” He leered at me, then snorted and sloped off.

Leigh did not say anything right away. He climbed onto a barstool and dabbed at the perspiration on his upper lip with his finger. He looked at his finger, and feelingly, said, “How do you stand it?”

It made me cringe. It happened, this moment of worry when, hearing a question that never occurred to me, I discovered that I had an answer, as once in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, a stranger wearing dark glasses asked, “Where you does wuck?” and I remembered and was afraid.

4

IN MY CUBICLE, irritably dialing a third hotel, I heard Gopi coming. Then, in Singapore, disability determined the job; Gopi, a cripple, was a peon from birth. He could be heard approaching by the sigh-shuffle-thump of his curious bike-riding gait. One leg was shorter than the other, and the knee in that rickety limb bent inward, collapsing into the good leg and making Gopi lean at a dangerous angle as he put his weight on it. A long step with his good leg checked his fall, and that was how he went, heaving along, dancing forward, swaying from side to side, like the standing dance of a man pumping a bike up a steep hill.

Some years ago a horse named Gopi’s Dream ran an eight-furlong race at the Singapore Turf Club. I was not a member of that club, but two dollars got me into the grandstand with the howling mob; and it was there that I spent at least one afternoon of every race meeting. I had just arrived and was getting my bearings when I saw that the horse I had picked for the first race had been scratched. There were poor odds on all the others except Gopi’s Dream, and the logic of choosing this horse was plain to me. I put ten dollars on him to win, though my usual bet was a deuce on a long shot to place, bolstered by a prayer, which I screamed into my hands as the ponies leaped down the homestretch. I told myself that half the bet was Gopi’s Deepavali present. Gopi’s Dream won, as all horses do when the logic is irrefutable, and it paid two hundred dollars; half I put away for Gopi, the rest I lost in the course of the afternoon.

The next day I took Gopi to a shop over on Armenian Street and had him fitted for a brace and a boot with a five-inch sole. He was a bit rocky on it at first, but soon he got the hang of it and instead of his cyclist’s swaying he learned a jerking limp, dragging the enormous boot and clumping it ahead of him and then chasing it with the other leg. The brace clinked and the boot gave out long twisting squeaks. The odd thing was that although he walked fairly straight he walked much more slowly, perspiring and pulling and swinging the boot along.

He stopped wearing the apparatus. He told me in Malay that it was “biting” his leg and that it was at the cobblers being put right. After a week I asked him about it; he started wearing it — two days of clinks and squeaks, then he stopped. I asked why. It was biting. The brace was a greater affliction than the limp, a cure more painful than the ailment; the incident cured me of certain regrets.

“All full up,” the voice was saying to me over the phone. Gopi peddled over and I slammed the receiver into its cradle.

“Hupstairs,” said Gopi, pointing his slender finger to indicate that Leigh was in Hing’s office. He clamped his tongue at the side of his mouth and scribbled in an invisible ledger to show he had seen Leigh writing. Then he asked me about Leigh: Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have children? Was he a Eurasian?

I told Gopi what I knew and asked what time Leigh had arrived.

“Seven-something.”

That was news. As an eager new employee at Hing’s, with the hunch that if I did a good job I had a chance for promotion, I used to come in at seven-something, too. By the time Hing rolled in I was already in a sweat, saying “Right you are, Mr. Hing,” and “Just leave it to me.” There was no promotion. I asked for Christmas off; Hing said, “I am Buddhist, but wucking on Besak Day, birthday of Buddha, isn’t it?” I started to come in at eight-something and never said “Leave it to me,” and after I made a go of my enterprise it was ten before I showed my face. I would not be promoted, but neither would I be sacked: he could never have gotten another ang moh for what he paid me. In the acceptance of this continuing meekness, the denial of any ambition, was an unvarying condition of enduring security and the annual promise of a renewed work permit. It was an angle, but it cost me my pride. When someone at a club bar or hotel lounge said, “Go on, Jack, have another one,” I was happy; I had the satisfaction of having earned my reward. The reminder that the drink would never have been offered if I hadn’t had a girl in tow was something that didn’t worry me unless a feller like Leigh woke up my scrupling with, “How do you stand it?” A feller who lived in Singapore and knew me would never have asked that. The real question was not how but why. My answer would have unstrung him, or anyone.

Leigh was eager to please Hing — that was plain. He had not found out it was no use. And who was he, this accountant from Hong Kong? A clerkly fugitive, laying low after an incautious embezzlement in London? Sacked by a British bank for interfering with a woman in Fixed Deposits, or for incompetence; and like many ang mohs in the East, seeking cover in a Chinese shop, consoling himself with clubby fantasies and the fact that he was too far away to be of concern, an alien at a great distance, the bird of passage who mentioned from time to time when things got rough that there was always Australia? He had lied about his clubs — the first time anyone had tried that on me — but so had I, three times over. It could not be held against him.

The feeling I had for him was an inward clutching at self-pity. There was so much I could have told him if only he had been friendly and stopped calling me Flowers. Go away and save yourself, I wanted to say; I could have watched him do that and watching him given myself hope. I had my girls; I knew the limits of employment; I had faith in extraordinary kinds of rescue, miraculous recoveries; I knew a thing or two about love. What was his alternative? I decided to watch him closely, this version of myself; his nervy question still rankled, and pity prevented me from asking him the same. He was not aware of how much I knew.

Seeing me engrossed, Gopi left, shoulders heaving. His arms did not swing or give him motion. They dangled uselessly as he pedaled. He was a small man, and sometimes I believed that without him I would have floundered.

I dialed another hotel for Gunstone and got another refusal. That was the last of his Victoria Street favorites. It was nearly lunchtime, so I called the Belvedere. I was at the airport, I told the receptionist, and did they have an air-conditioned double room for one night?

“All our rooms — we got eight hundred plus — they are all air-conditioned,” she said.

“That’s very nice,” I said, and made the reservation. “If Hing asks,” I told Gopi, leaving him holding the can as usual — but who except the meekest man would hold it? — “tell him I’m down with the flu.”

Since it was going to be lunch at the Tanglin, then off to the Belvedere, I thought I’d better change my duds.

“Why the black suit?” Gunstone asked.

“My others are at the cleaners,” I said, still rolling “I’ve just come from a funeral” around on my tongue. He would have asked who died, or perhaps have been spooked by the announcement. I had the fluent liar’s sense of proportion and foresight. Gunstone was calmed.

Lunch was the Friday special, my favorite, seafood buffet. I followed Gunstone, taking the same things he did, in the same amounts, and I soon realized that I was heaping my plate with oysters and prawns, which I liked less than the crab and lobster Gunstone took in two small helpings. I put some oysters back and got a frown from the Malay chef.

At the table I said, “I hope I haven’t boobed, Mr. Gunstone, but I’ve fixed you up at the Belvedere this afternoon.”

He stabbed a prawn and peeled off the shell and dunked the naked finger of pink meat into a saucer of chili paste. “Don’t believe we’ve ever been to the Belvedere before, have we, Jack?”

“The other places were full,” I said.

“Quite all right,” he said. “But I ate at the Belvedere last week. It wasn’t much good, you know.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Mr. Gunstone,” I said. “That food is perfectly hideous.”

“Exactly,” said Gunstone. “How’s your salmon?”

I had not started to eat. I took a forkful, smeared it in mayonnaise, and ate it. “Delicious,” I said.

“Mine’s awful,” he said, and he pushed his salmon to the side of his plate.

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it does taste rather—”

“Desiccated,” said Gunstone.

“Exactly,” I said. I pushed my salmon over to the side and covered it with a lettuce leaf. I was sorry; I liked salmon the way it tasted out of a can.

“Lobster’s pretty dreadful, too,” said Gunstone a moment later.

I was just emptying a large claw. It was excellent, and I ate the whole claw before saying, “Right again, Mr. Gunstone. Tastes like they fished it out of the Muar River.”

“We’ll shunt that over, shall we?” said Gunstone. He moved a lobster tail next to the discarded salmon.

I did the same, then as quickly as I could ate all my crab salad before he could say it was bad. I gnawed a hard roll and started on the oysters.

“The prawns are a success,” he said.

“The oysters are—” I didn’t want to finish the sentence, but Gunstone was no help “—sort of limp.”

“They’re cockles, actually,” said Gunstone. “And they’re a damned insult. Steward!” A Malay waiter came over. “Take this away.”

Demanding that food be sent back to the kitchen is a special skill. It is done with panache by people who use that word. I admired people who did it, but could not imitate them.

“Yours, Tuan?” asked the waiter.

“Yes, take it away,” I said sadly.

“Want more, Tuan?” the waiter asked Gunstone.

“If I wanted more would I be asking you to remove that plate?” Gunstone said.

The waiter slid my lunch away. I buttered a hard roll and ate it, making crumbs shower down the front of my suit.

“That steward,” said Gunstone, shaking his head. “The most intelligent thing I ever heard him say was, ‘If you move your lump of ice cream a bit to the right, Tuan, you will find a strawberry.’ God help us.”

I laughed and brushed my jacket. “Still,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind joining this club.”

“You don’t want to join this club,” said Gunstone.

“I do,” I said, and saw myself lying in the sun, by the pool, and one of those tanned long-legged women whispering urgently, “Jack, where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s all set.”

“Why, whatever for?”

“A place to go, I suppose,” I said. The Bandung’s only publicity was the matchboxes Wallace Thumboo had printed with the slogan, There’s Always Someone You Know at the Bandung!

Gunstone chuckled. “If they can pronounce your name you can join.”

“Flowers is pretty easy.”

“I should say so!”

But Fiori isn’t, I thought. And Fiori was my name, Flowers an approximation and a mask.

“Now,” said Gunstone, looking at his watch, “how about dessert?”

Gunstone’s joke: it was time to fetch Djamila.

The old-timers, I found, tended to prefer Malays, while the newcomers went for the Chinese, and the Malays preferred each other. The Chinese clients, of whom I had several, liked the big-boned Australian girls; Germans were fond of Tamils, and the English fellers liked anything young, but preferred their girls boyish and their women mannish. British sailors from H.M.S. Terror enjoyed fighting each other in the presence of transvestites. Americans liked clean sporty ones, to whom they would give nicknames, like “Skeezix” and “Pussycat” (the English made an effort to learn the girl’s real name), and would spend a whole afternoon trying to teach one of my girls how to swim in a hotel pool, although it was costing them fifteen dollars an hour to do it. Americans also went in for a lot of hugging in the taxi, smooching and kidding around, and sort of stumbling down the sidewalk, gripping the girl hard and saying, “Aw, honey, whoddle ah do?” Later they wrote them letters, and the girls pestered me to help them reply.

Djamila—“Jampot,” an American feller used to call her, and it suited her — was very reliable and easy to contact. She was waiting by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank with my trusty suitcase as we pulled up in the taxi. I hopped out and opened the door for her, then got into the front seat and put the suitcase between my knees. Djamila climbed in with Gunstone and sat smiling, rocking her handbag in her lap.

Smiling is something girls with buck teeth seldom do with any pleasure; Djamila showed hers happily, charming things, very white in her broad mouth. She had small ears, a narrow moonlit face, large darting eyes, and heavy eyebrows. A slight girl, even skinny, but having said that one would have to add that her breasts were large and full, her bum high and handsome as a pumpkin. Her breasts were her virtue, the virtue of most of my Malay girls; unlike the Chinese bulbs that disappeared in a frock fold, these were a pair of substantial jugs, something extra that moved and made a rolling wobble of her walk. That was the measure of acceptable size, that bobbing, one a second later than the other, each responding to the step of Djamila’s small feet. Her bottom moved on the same prompting, but in a different rhythm, a wonderful agitation in the willowy body, a glorious heaving to and fro, the breasts nodding above the black lace of the tight-waisted blouse, the packed-in bum lifting, one buttock pumping against the other, creeping around her sarong as she shuffled, showing her big teeth.

“Jack, you looking very smart,” said Djamila. “New suit and what not.”

“I put it on for you, sweetheart,” I said. “This here’s Mr. Gunstone, an old pal of mine.”

Djamila shook his hand and said, “Jack got nice friends.”

“Where’s that little car of yours, Jack?” Gunstone asked.

“It packed up,” I said. “Being fixed.”

“What’s the trouble this time?”

“Suspension, I think. Front end sort of shimmies, like Djamila but not as pretty.”

“It’s always the way with those little French cars. Problems. It’s the workmanship.”

The taxi pulled up in front of the Belvedere. The doorman in a top hat and tails snatched the door open and let Gunstone out. I handed over the suitcase; it was a good solid Antler, a sober pebbly gray, filled with copies of the Straits Times and an R.A.F. first-aid kit, a useful item — once we had to use the tourniquet on a Russian seaman, and the little plasters were always handy for scratches.

“You should get yourself a Morris,” said Gunstone at the reception desk.

I could not answer right away because I was signing my name on the register and the clerk was welcoming me with a copy of What’s On in Singapore. I was not worried about being asked about Gunstone and Djamila; anything is possible in a big expensive hotel, and the accommodating manager will always smile and say he remembers you. In the elevator I said, “Yes, your Morris is a good buy.”

“I like Chevy,” said Djamila.

The elevator boy and the bellhop stared at her. My girls looked fine, very pretty in bars and on the street, but in well-lighted hotels they looked different, not out of place, but prominent and identifiable.

“I hate these American cars,” said Gunstone.

“So do I,” I said. “Waste of money.”

“Nice and big,” said Djamila. She gave a low throaty laugh. Most of my girls had bad throats: it was the line of work, all those germs.

“Here you are, sah. Seven-o-five,” said the bellhop. He followed us in and swung the suitcase over to a low table; I could hear the newspapers shift inside. He started his spiel about the lights and if there’s anything you want, but I interrupted him, pressing fifty cents into his hand, and he took off.

“Your lights,” I said, discovering the switch and turning them all on. I went around the room naming appliances and opening doors, as the bellhop would have done if I had given him a chance. “Your TV, your washroom, window blinds, radio—” switching that on I got a melody from Doctor Zhivago. “I think everything is in order.”

“You couldn’t do better than a Morris,” said Gunstone. He came over to me and said, “What’s she like?” in a whisper.

“Very rewarding,” I said. “Very rewarding indeed.”

Djamila was sitting on the edge of the large double bed, removing her silver bracelets. She did it with dainty grace, admiring her arm and showing herself her fingernails as she pulled each bracelet past them.

Gunstone, on a stuffed chair, sighed and twisted off one of his shoes. He had pulled off a sock and was intently poking the limp thing into the empty shoe, pushing at the balled-up sock with his trembling finger, when I said: “I’ll leave you two to get on with it. Bye for now.”

The elevator boy, seeing the feller he had just deposited on that floor, looked away from me, at the button he was punching, and I could tell from the movement of his ears and a peculiar tightening of a section of scalp on the back of his head that he had summed up the situation and was grinning foolishly. I felt like socking him.

“What’s your name?”

“Tony-lah,” he said. A person sobers up when he has to tell a stranger his name.

“Here you are, Tony.” I handed him a dollar. “Don’t blab,” I said. “Nobody likes a blabber.”

That dollar would have come in handy, and I could have saved it if I had gone down the fire stairs, which was what I usually did. But seven flights of dusty-smelling unpainted cement was more than a man my age should tolerate. A little arithmetic satisfied me that I could afford one drink; in the Belvedere lounge-bar the hors d’oeuvres were free.

Avoiding the lobby, I nipped into the lounge, found a cool leather armchair, and sat very happily for a few minutes reading What’s On and looking up every so often to admire the decor. Yardley and the rest did not think much of the new Singapore hotels — too shiny and tacky, they said, no character at all. Character was weevils in your food, metal folding chairs, and a grouchy barman who insulted you as he overcharged you; it was a monsoon drain that hadn’t been cleared for months and a toilet — like the one in the Bandung — located in the middle of the kitchen. Someday, I thought, I’m going to reserve a room at the Belvedere and burrow in the blankets of a wide bed — the air conditioner on full — and sleep for a week. The ground floor of the Belvedere was Italian marble and there was a chandelier hanging in the lobby that must have taken years to make. I was enjoying myself in the solid comfort, sipping my gin, looking at a seashell mural on the lounge wall, periwinkles spilling out of conches, gilded sea urchins and fingers of coral; but I became anxious.

It was not my habitual worry about Gunstone’s engine failing. It was the annoying suspicion that the seven or eight tourists there in the lounge were staring in my direction. They had seen me come in with Gunstone and Djamila and like Tony they had guessed what I was up to. The ones who weren’t laughing at me despised me. If I had been younger they would have said, “Ah, what a sharp lad, a real operator — you’ve got to hand it to him”; but a middle-aged man doing the same thing was a dull dirty procurer. I tried to look unruffled, crossing my legs and flicking through the little pamphlet. Recrossing my legs I felt an uncommon breeze against my ankles: I wasn’t wearing any socks.

How could I be so stupid? There I was in the lounge of an expensive hotel, wearing my black Ah Chum worsted, a dark tie and white shirt and shoes my amah had buffed to a high gloss — and sockless! That was how they knew my trade, by my nude ankles. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t without calling attention to myself. So I sat in the chair in a way which made it possible for me to push at the knees of my pants and lower my cuffs over my ankles. I tried to convince myself that these staring tourists didn’t matter — they’d all be on the morning flight to Bangkok.

I lifted my drink and caught a lady’s eye. She looked away. Returning to my reading, I sensed her eyes drift over to me again. You never knew with these American ladies; they made faces at each other in public, sometimes hilarious ones, a sisterly foolishness. The other people began staring. They were making me miserable, ruining the only drink I could afford. The embarrassment was Leigh’s doing; the stranger had called my vocation “poncing.”

“Telephone call for Bishop Bradley… Bishop Bradley…” The slow demanding announcement came over the loud-speaker in the lounge, a cloth-faced box on the wall above a slender palm in a copper pot. No one got up. Two ladies looked at the loud-speaker.

It stopped, the voice and the hum behind it; there was and expectant pause in the lounge, everyone holding his breath, knowing the announcement would start again in a moment, which it did, monotonously.

“Bishop Bradley… Telephone call for Bishop Bradley…”

Now no one was looking at the loud-speaker.

I had fastened all the buttons on my black suit jacket. I stood up and turned an impatient face to the repeated command coming from the cloth-faced box. I swigged the last of my gin and with the eyes of those people upon me, strode out in my clerical-looking garb in the direction of the information desk. I knew I had made them sorry for staring at my sockless feet, for judging my action at the desk, and There goes the bishop, they were saying.

Outside I walked up and down Orchard Road until Gunstone and Djamila appeared, all the while blaming Leigh for this new behavior of mine, embarrassment and fumbling shame making me act strangely. His shadow obscured my way: I wanted him to go.

5

IT WAS EARLY lighted evening, that pleasant glareless time of day just before sunset; the moon showed in a blue sky — a pale gold sickle on its back — and it was possible to stroll through the mild air without hunching over and squinting away from the sun. It was the only hour when the foliage was not tinged with hues of sickly yellow; trees were denser, green, and cool. All the two-story Chinese houses set in courtyards along Cuppage Road had their doors and green shutters open for the breeze, and there was a sense of slowed activity, almost of languor, that the sight at dusk of men in pajamas — the uniform of the peaceloving — produces in me.

A formation of swallows dived into view, pivoted sharply like bats, and then chased, lurching this way and that, toward the brightest part of the sky, where a reddening millrace of cloud poured this brightness into a subdued rosy wash. The palms towering above the Bandung did not sway — they never did in Singapore — but I could hear the papery rattle of the fronds shaking, hearing a coolness I couldn’t feel. To a northern-born American, the palm tree was when I was growing up, a graceful symbol of wealth: it suggested lush Florida, sunny winter vacations, certain movie stars and long days of play, white stucco hotels and casinos on wide beaches, and fresh fruit all year round; fellers had fun under nature’s parasol. I looked up at the Bandung’s palms, a tree I no longer associate with fun, so as to avoid looking at the top of the stockade wall enclosing the garden; on top of the wall glass shards were planted to discourage intruders and the sight of these bristling never failed to make my pecker ache.

I crunched down the cobblestone path, under the tunnel of vines, in the comfortable damp of the freshly watered garden; the sun had dropped behind the roof of the Bandung and was now dazzling at the back door, shooting brilliant gold streaks through two rooms, along the ground floor on the gleaming tiles. My jacket sat well on me for the first time that day, and with Gunstone’s envelope of cash in my breast pocket, I was cool and happy.

But I knew what I was in for: I quailed when I heard Yardley’s angry whoop of abuse echo in the big room. I paused near the wicker chairs on the verandah, and for a hopeless fluid moment I wished there was somewhere else I could go. It wasn’t possible. A man my age, for whom a bar was a habit and a consolation — a reassurance of community that could nearly be tender — a man my age didn’t drink in strange bars; that meant an upsetting break in routine; my friends interpreted absence as desertion, and they did not forgive easily. It would have seemed especially suspicious if I had avoided the Bandung after being responsible for bringing Leigh there the previous evening. Leigh had intruded and disturbed Yardley — Yardley’s last joke was proof of that. The blame was mine and an explanation was expected of me. I had come prepared to denounce Leigh.

Yardley saw me and stopped whooping. Frogget was beside him; Smale, Yates, and Coony were at the bar, and over in an armchair drinking soybean milk and absorbed in the Reader’s Digest sat old Mr. Tan Lim Hock. Mr. Tan, a retired civil servant, helped the regulars at the Bandung with their income tax—“He can skin a maggot,” Yardley said. He was a rather tense man whom I had seen smile only twice: once, when he saw what Hing paid me (“Is this per mensem or per annum?” he asked), and once — that day in 1967—when China exploded her H-bomb.

I crossed the tiles and ordered a gin. Yardley’s defiant silence, and the sheepishness on the faces of the rest, told me what I had expected: that Leigh was the subject of the abusive shouts.

“What’s cooking?” I said.

“Are you alone?” asked Yardley. Yates and Coony looked at him as if they expected him to continue, but all he said when I told him I was alone was, “Wally nearly got pranged this afternoon. Isn’t that right, Wally? Got a damned great bruise on his arm. Show us your bruise again, Wally, come on.”

Wally, at the center of attention, was uncomfortable. “Not too bad,” he said, smiling at his bandaged elbow.

“That’s not what you told me!” said Yardley. He turned to me. “Poor little sod nearly got killed!” Yardley was maddened; ordinarily, Wally’s injury would not have mattered to him — he might even have mocked it — but Yardley was in a temper, and his anger about Leigh, which I had deflected by barging in, had become a general raging. It was at times like this that he called Frogget “Desmond” instead of “Froggy” (and Frogget didn’t object: he had attached himself to Yardley and like Wally simplified his loyalty by surrendering to abuse for praise); and it was only in anger that Yardley remembered I was an American.

“It’s these bloody taxis,” said Yates — the “bloody” was for Yardley’s benefit. Yates was a quiet soul, the only one of us who did not work for a towkay. He got what were called “perks,” home leave every two years, education and family allowances, and could look forward to a golden handshake and one hundred cubic feet of sea freight.

“No, it’s not,” said Yardley. “It’s these jumped-up bastards who come here and act like they own the road.” He stared at me. “You know the kind, don’t you, Jack?”

“I see them now and again,” I said.

“Who was it, Wally? Was it a Chink that ran you down?”

Mr. Tan Lim Hock was ten feet away; he chose not to hear.

“European,” said Wally, blinking and gasping at his own recklessness. “He didn’t hit me, I fell. Assident.”

“He hit you, you silly shit,” said Yardley. “I knew it was a European, and I’ll bet he doesn’t live in Singapore either. No sir, not him. Wouldn’t dare. Take someone like that friend of yours, Jack—”

Yardley began blaming Leigh for Wally’s bruise. Not so incredible: a month earlier, in a similar series of associations, after he had been overcharged by the Singapore Water Board on an item marked “sewer fee,” he flung the crumpled bill in Wally’s face and said, “There’s no end to the incompetence of you fuckers.” Now, Yardley worked himself up into such a lather that soon he was saying — ignoring Wally and the bruise—“That pal of yours, that shifty little bastard would run down the lot of us if we gave him half a chance, I can tell you that. If Jack keeps bringing him in here I’m going to stay home — nothing against you, Jack, but you should know better. Wally, for God’s sake look alive and give me a double.”

“Let me explain,” I said. They didn’t know the half of it; I could tell them Leigh’s lie about his club, the airport story about “What ship your flend flom?” and how he had suggested we go see Hing before having a drink (“Arse licker!” Yardley would have cried). But I flubbed it before I began by saying, “William arrived yesterday, and where else—”

“William?” Yardley looked at me. “You call that little maggot William? Well, I’ll be damned.” He shook his head. “Jack, don’t be a sucker. Even bloody Desmond can see that bugger’s jumped-up, and he knows you’re a Yank so he can get away with telling you he’s governor general—you won’t know the difference. Listen to me. I’m telling you he’s so shifty the light doesn’t strike him.”

“I hear he’s a nasty piece of work,” said Coony.

“He’s all fart and no arse,” said Smale, who then mimicked Leigh, saying, “I haven’t the remotest idea.”

“He’d try the patience of a bloody saint,” said Yardley.

“Why don’t you lay off him,” I said, surprising myself with the objection.

“Jack likes him,” said Yardley. “Don’t he, Desmond?”

“Yeah,” said Frogget, turning away from me and rubbing his nose which in profile was a snout. “I fancy he does.”

“I don’t,” I said, and although I had planned a moment earlier to denounce Leigh, I hated myself for saying it. When I first saw Leigh at the airport I had an inkling — a tic of doubt that made me want to look into a mirror — of how other people saw me. Now I understood that tic, and whatever I might say about Leigh did not matter: I could prove my dislike to these fellers at the bar facing me, but there was no way I could make myself believe it. It was not very complicated. Middle age is a sense of slipping and decline, and I suppose I had my first glimpse of this frailty in Leigh, the feeling of the body growing unreliable, getting out of control in a mournfully private way — only the occupier of the body could know. Once, I might have said, “He’s all fart and no arse,” but hearing it from Smale was a confirmation of my fear. The ridicule involved me — it was fear, and I was inclined now to defend the stranger, for hearing him ridiculed I knew how others ridiculed me; defending him was merciful, but it also answered a need in myself by providing me with a defense.

It was so simple. But the peril of being over fifty is, with anger’s quick ignition, the age’s clinging to transparent deceptions. We let others confirm what we already know, and we get mad because they say it; what appears like revelation is the calling of a desperate bluff: the young wiseacre who, starting his story, says, “This feller was really old, about fifty or sixty—” drives every listener over fifty up the wall. We knew it before he said it. What is aggravating is not that the wiseacre knows, but that he thinks it’s important and holds it against us. Our only defense is in refusing to laugh at his damned joke.

So: “He’s not here,” I said, “and it’s not fair to talk behind his back.”

“Look who’s talking about being fair!” said Yardley. He had overcome his colicky anger and was laughing at me. “Who is it that imitates the maggot skinner when his back is turned?”

It was true; I did. When Mr. Tan left the bar I sometimes did an imitation of him with his Reader’s Digest and bottle of Vimto soybean milk. I looked over and was glad to see that Mr. Tan had gone home; Yardley’s “Chink” had done it. My other routines were Wally polishing glasses, Frogget’s shambling, and Yardley, drunk, forgetting the punch line of a joke. My imitations were not very accurate, but my size and panting determination made the attempt funny. Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leaves the man alone; I did not like to be reminded by my brand of mimicry.

“I’m turning over a new leaf,” I said.

“By wearing a suit?” Smale asked.

Of course. I had forgotten I was wearing a suit. That bothered them most of all. They were sensitive about fellers who dressed up and made a bluff of the success they felt was denied everyone because it was denied them.

“I had to go to a funeral,” I said. I took off my jacket and rolled up my shirt-sleeves. I knew instantly what Yardley’s next words would be.

He said: “Don’t tell me your friend’s packed it in!”

“That’d be a ruddy shame,” said Smale.

“Let’s drop it, shall we?” I said. After all my indignant sympathy that was the only rebellion I could offer.

Then Leigh walked in.

I heard Gopi’s characteristic trampling of the cobbled path in the garden, his whisper, and Leigh’s, “Ah, yes, here we are,” and my heart quickened.

“Long time no see,” said Yardley.

Leigh brightened; but Yardley was beckoning to Gopi and ordering Gopi a drink. “How you doing?” said Yardley, putting his arm around the peon.

“There you are,” said Leigh. I winced at the demonstration of pretended relief. Leigh glanced at the others and said, “’d evening” and “M’ellew.”

“Go on,” said Yardley, “drink up! There’s a good chap.”

Gopi had a whiskey in his hand. He drank it all and at once his eyes glazed, his face went ashen and matched his caste mark.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Gopi, don’t drink if you’re not in the mood.”

“He’s going to be sick,” said Coony.

“I like this little chap’s company,” said Yardley. It was his revenge on Leigh. “Have another one?”

Gopi nodded, but he was not saying yes. He covered his face with a hanky and pedaled to the door. Outside, in the garden, he became loud, hawking and spitting.

“The call of the East,” said Smale.

Gopi groaned, and dragged himself away.

“That was mighty nice of you,” I said to Yardley.

“He’ll be all right,” Yardley muttered, and turned away, saying, “Now, where was I?” to Frogget and Smale.

“How are you doing?” asked Leigh.

“Anyone I can,” I said.

“That clerk of yours very kindly showed me the way here. Poor chap’s got a sort of gammy leg, hasn’t he, and I was a bit sorry he had to—” Leigh was still talking about Gopi’s lameness, but he was not looking me in the eye. He stared at my tattoos, the ones on my left arm, and in particular at the long blue crucifix crowned with a circle of thorns dripping inverted commas of blood onto my wrist. I pressed my right to my side as soon as I saw him fasten on the left.

“He’s a wonderful feller,” I said. “Minds his own business.” I reached for my drink and when I lifted it his gaze lifted until it met my own. He looked tired. He had been hard at work all day, probably sitting in that low chair in Hing’s office, out of range of the fan’s blowing, while Hing looked on and slapped at papers on his desk. Leigh’s eyes were watery and his hair was stuck to his head with sweat; the floridness of his face, which had looked like ruddy good health the day before, was not a solid color, but rather many little veins and splotches. I looked at him as at a picture in a newspaper that goes insubstantial with closeness, the face blurred to a snowfall of dots.

“How do the accounts look?” I asked, handing Leigh a tumbler of gin.

“Bit ropey,” said Leigh. “Any of the pink stuff?”

Wally shook some drops of Angostura into the gin.

“That’ll put lead in your pencil,” I said.

“Best to put it in the glass before the gin and work it around the sides,” said Leigh. He wrapped the glass in his hanky, said, “Cheers,” and drank.

“I don’t mind telling him to get knotted,” Yardley was saying.

“Bit ropey,” Leigh repeated, smacking his lips. “We’ll sort it out, though if you ask me, your towkay’s missing a few beads from his abacus.”

“He’ll drive you out of your gourd,” I said.

“Funny little thing, isn’t he? I can’t understand a word he says.”

“What about your towkay—in Hong Kong?” I asked.

“Him!” Leigh gathered his features solemnly together and said, “In actual fact… he’s a cunt.”

Yardley heard and smiled, and I wondered for a moment whether the obscenity would redeem Leigh. It didn’t. Yardley continued to talk to the fellers on my right, and sometimes to me; Leigh spoke only to me. I was, awkwardly, in the middle, a zone of good humor. There was no way out of it; to skip off with Leigh would mean the end of my drinking at the Bandung; the desertion would prohibit my return. Soon Yardley was saying less and less to me, and Leigh growing quite talkative on his third drink.

“—God, sometimes I hate it,” Leigh said. “One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City. The call of the East indeed — your friend over there was right. That fantastic hoicking puts me off my food, it really does. Still, it won’t be much longer.”

“How long do you plan to stay in Hong Kong?”

“My dear fellow,” said Leigh, “not a moment longer than is absolutely necessary.”

In different words, for fourteen years I’d said the same thing to myself; it was an ambiguous promise, and when I said it, it sounded like never. But Leigh’s sounded like soon.

“Margaret — my wife — Margaret’s got a magnificent cottage picked out. In Wiltshire — you know it? Fantastic place. When I go all broody about the Chinese, Margaret looks at me and says, ‘We’re halfway to Elmview’—that’s the name of the cottage. That cheers me up. And then I don’t feel so bad about—”

The name depressed me; it sounded like the name of an old folks’ home, and I imagined an overheated parlor, a radio playing too loud, an elderly inmate snoring in an armchair, another in a frilly apron busying himself with a dustpan and brush, and a young heavy nurse patiently feeding a protesting crone who was wearing a blue plastic bib and batting the spoon away with her hand. Just saying the name lifted Leigh’s spirits; he was still talking about the cottage.

“—thought of doing a little book about my experiences. Call it Hong Kong Jottings and pack it with sampans and chatter from the club, that sort of thing. I see myself at Elmview on a spring morning, in the front room, sun splashing through the window, working on this book. In longhand, of course. Outside I can see masses of bluebells and a green meadow.” He sighed. “An old horse out to pasture.”

“It sounds—” I could not think of another way of saying it—“very agreeable.”

“You know,” he said, “I’ve never set foot in that cottage. I saw it from a motorcar; Margaret pointed it out from the road. It was raining. We had a ploughman’s lunch in the village — beautiful old pub — and went back to London that same afternoon. But it’s as if I’ve been living there my whole life. I can tell you the position of every stick of furniture, every plate, how the sun strikes the carpet. I can see the tea things arranged on the table, and there’s that—” he sniffed—“curious stale smell of cold ashes in the grate.”

Yardley used to say, “Everyone in the tropics has a funkhole,” and Leigh had told me his; his description had taken the curse off the name — the place was happy, a credible refuge. I had my own plans. I had never told a soul; I had kept my imaginings to myself and added little details now and then over the years. Maybe I had had one gin too many, or it might have been my triumphant feeling over that Bishop Bradley business. Whatever it was — it might have been Leigh’s candor magnetizing mine — I drew very close to him and whispered, “It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Everyone imagines a different funkhole. Take mine, for example. You know what I want?”

“Tell me,” said Leigh, sympathetically.

“First, I want a lot of money — people don’t laugh at a feller with dough. Then I want a yacht that you can sleep on and a huge mansion with a fence or a wall around it and maybe a peacock in the garden. I’d like to walk around all day in silk pajamas, and take up golf and give up these stinking cheroots and start smoking real Havana cigars. And that’s not all—”

Leigh gave me an awfully shocked look; it rattled me so badly I stuttered to a halt and finished my drink in a single gulp. He thought I was mocking him. The dream of mine, the little glimpse of fantasy that had widened into the whole possible picture I saw every day I spent on that island, saving my sanity as I obeyed Hing or turned my girls out or sorted pornographic pictures on the kitchen table in my house in Moulmein Green, hopeful and comforting in its detail, making me resourceful — that to him was mockery.

He said, “Are you taking the mickey out of me?”

There was no way I could explain that I was perfectly serious. I saw it all coming to me quickly, like a jackpot I imagined myself winning: “Just a minute,” I would say to the fellers at the bar, and while everyone watched I would put a coin — say my last — into a one-arm bandit, yank the lever and watch the whirr become a row of stars as the machine exploded and roared, disgorging a shower of silver dollars.

An old horse out to pasture, he had said; I had not giggled — at that or the bluebells. I believed it because he did. But my version of Elmview, my own funkhole (deep-sea fishing in a silk robe and a velvet fedora, with a cigar in my teeth) made him mad. And what bothered me most was that I could not tell whether he felt mocked because my imaginings were grander than his or because they sounded absurd and he doubted them. I would not have minded his envy, but his doubt would have made my whole plan seem inaccessible to me by encouraging my own doubt.

His grim expression made me say what I at once regretted: “I guess it sounds pretty crazy.”

He did not hear me. Behind me, Yardley was horsing around, bawling a joke: “‘Organ,’ she says. ‘That’s no organ, breh-heh! Looks more like a flute to me!’”

“I take it Singapore’s not a terribly expensive place to live,” said Leigh.

“That’s a laugh,” I said. “It’s probably more expensive than Hong Kong!”

“I’m quite surprised,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. He took a sip of his drink. “Then the salaries here aren’t very, um, realistic.”

“They’re not too bad,” I said. I even laughed a little bit. But I stopped laughing when I saw what he was driving at. “You mean Hing?”

He nodded and gave me the tight rewarded smile of a man who has just tasted something he likes. He said, “You’ve got an amah’s salary.”

“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” I said. “If you think I bank on—” But I was ashamed, and flustered — and angry because he still wore that smile. He had spent the day in that upstairs cubicle examining my salary. What could I say? That Gunstone had a few hours before thanked me with an envelope of cash? That I was welcome in any club in Singapore, and was snooker champion of one (unbeaten on the table at the Island Club), and knew a sultan who called me Jack and who had introduced me as his friend to Edmund de Rothschild at a party? That once, on Kampong Java Road, where I had my own brothel, I cleared a couple of thousand after pilferage and breakage was settled? That Edwin Shuck of the American embassy had told me that if it had not been for me Singapore would never have been used as a base for the GIs’ “R and R” and Paradise Gardens would not have existed? That I had plans?

I hated him most when he said, with a concern that was contemptuous patronage, “How do you manage?”

My elbows were on the bar, my head in my hands. Far off on a green ocean I saw a yacht speeding toward me with its pennants snapping in the breeze. A man in a swivel chair on the afterdeck had his feet braced on the gunwales and was pulling at a bending rod. Just behind him a lovely girl in a swimsuit stood with a tray of drinks and — I knew — club sandwiches, fresh olives, dishes of rollmop herring, and caviar spread on yellow crackers. The fish leaped, a tall silver thing turning in the sun, whipping the line out of the water. The yacht was close and I could see the man now. It was not me; it was no one I knew. I released my fingers from my eyes.

“Flowers,” said Leigh. Why was he smiling? “How about a drink at the club?”

My girls were fairly well known at the Bandung—“Jack’s fruit flies,” Yardley called them — but no one there had any knowledge of my club work, and how I came straight from the Churchill Room or the Raffles Grill to the Bandung like an unfaithful husband home from his beguiling mistress’s arms. I tried to whisper, “Maybe later.”

Leigh looked beyond me to the others. “Does this establishment,” he said, “have a toilet?”

“In the kitchen,” said Coony, glad for a chance to say it.

Wally pointed the way.

“Does this establishment have a toilet?” said Smale. He guffawed. I wondered if Leigh could hear.

“Calls it a toilet,” said Yardley. “He knows it’s a crapper, but he calls it a toilet. That’s breeding, you understand.”

Frogget went yuck-yuck.

“What’s this club he’s talking about?” asked Yardley suspiciously.

I said I didn’t have the remotest idea.

“You sound more like him every day,” said Yardley.

“Knock it off,” I said.

“Don’t be narked,” said Smale. “He’s your mate, ain’t he?”

“He hasn’t bought anyone a drink yet,” said Coony. “I could tell he was a mean bastard.”

“Did you hear him rabbiting on?” asked Smale.

“I liked the part about him having tea in the pasture,” said Frogget. “That shows he’s around the twist.”

They had heard. They had been talking the whole time but they had caught what Leigh had said about Elmview — a distorted version of it. I had whispered, confiding my hopes; they could not have heard me. But why had I weakened and told Leigh? And who would he tell? He was out of the room; I wanted him to stay out, never to come back, and for his engine to gripe and stop his mouth.

“He’s a pain in the neck,” I said, at last.

“Been in the bog a little while,” said Smale. “What do you suppose he’s doing in there?”

“Probably tossing himself off,” said Frogget.

“You’re a delicate little feller,” I said.

No one said anything for a little while, but it was not what I had said to Frogget that caused the silence. We were waiting for the flush, which you could hear in the bar. The only sounds were the fans on the ceiling and the murmuring of Wally’s transistor. We were drinking without speaking, and looking around in the way fellers do when they have just come into a bar; Leigh might have crept back without pulling the chain.

“So he’s doing your towkay’s accounts,” said Yardley. It was a meaningless remark, but for Yardley an extraordinary tone of voice: he whispered it.

“It’s a very fiddly sort of job,” said Yates after a moment. “You really have to know what’s what.”

“Takes ages to do those sums,” said Smale. “Our accountant told me some days he looks at all those numbers and feels like cutting his throat.”

“You have to pass an exam,” said Coony, staring toward the kitchen. “To be an accountant. It’s a bugger to pass. I know a bloke who failed it five times. Bright bloke, too.”

Yardley called Wally, who was holding his radio to his ear the way a child holds a seashell for the sound. He ordered drinks and when Wally set them up Yardley handed me two gins and a bottle of tonic water. “Pink one’s for your pal,” he said. He glanced toward the kitchen.

“I wouldn’t mind living in Wiltshire,” Smale said. He said it with reverent hope, and we continued talking like this, in whispers. I had not realized just how long Leigh had been gone until I saw that the ice in his pink gin had melted and my own glass was empty.

I climbed down from the barstool and hurried into the kitchen. The toilet door was ajar, but Leigh was not inside. He was sitting on a white kitchen chair, by the back door, with his head between his knees.

“William,” I said, “are you okay?”

He shook his head from side to side without raising it.

“Get up and walk around a bit. It’s cool out back. The fresh air — can you hear me? — the fresh air will do you a world of good. Can you get up?”

He groaned. The back of his neck was damp, the sick man’s sweat made his hair prickle; his ears had gone white. I knew it was his engine.

“He sick-lah,” said Wally, appearing beside me with the radio squawking in his hand.

“Will you shut that fucking thing off!” I screamed. I do not know why I objected or swore. “Get a doctor, and hurry!”

Wally jumped to the phone.

Yardley and the others came into the kitchen as I was helping Leigh up. Leigh’s face had a white horror-struck expression — wide unmoving nose holes — that of a man drowning slowly in many fathoms of water. I had seen these poor devils hoisted out of the drink: their mouths gaped open and they stared past you with anxious bugging eyes, as if they have acquired phenomenal sight, the ability to see far, and see at that great distance something looming, a throng of terrors. Leigh looked that way; he seemed about to whisper rather than scream. He was breathing: I saw a flutter in his throat, and a movement like a low bubble rise and fall in the declivity of his shoulder.

We carried him into the lounge, stretched him out on the sofa, and put pillows under his head. I took off his watch; it had made white roulettes on his wrist, perforations that wouldn’t go away. He looked paler than ever, more frightening in the posture of a corpse. But the worst part was when his legs came alive — just his legs, like a man having a tantrum — and his kicking heels made an ungodly clatter on the bamboo armrest of the sofa.

“Christ,” said Coony, stepping back. Smale and Frogget clamped their hands on his ankles and held them down. The clattering stopped, but the silence after that weird noise was much worse.

I was conscious of standing there with my tattooed arms hanging at my sides, not doing a blessed thing, and I heard a voice, Yardley’s, saying, “See that tatty sofa over in the lounge near the piano? That’s where Jack’s mate from Hong Kong packed it in. It was the damnedest thing—”

I turned to shut him up. But he was not talking; he was standing, expressionless, holding Leigh’s drink, the pale pink gin in which all the ice had melted. He seemed to be offering it to Leigh and though he held the tumbler in two hands it was shaking.

Leigh stared past us, at that looming thing very far off we could not see. I memorized his astonishment. It made us and the Bandung and everything on earth small and unimportant, not worth notice, and we were — for the time Leigh was on the sofa — as curious and baffled as those people on a city sidewalk who pass a man looking up at the sky and look up themselves but are made uneasy because they can’t see the thing they know must be there.

6

THAT WAS how, in a manner of speaking — by the act of dying — Leigh had the last word; though toward the end we tried to take back the things we had said. I have a memory of the six of us dancing around that green sofa in the badly lighted lounge, before the doctor came and took him away, frantically attempting ways to revive him, to coax him back to life so that we could have another chance to be kind to him — or perhaps so that he could amend his last words, which had been “Does this establishment have a toilet?” to something if less memorable, more dignified.

Our reviving methods were the ineffectual kind we had learned from movies: lifting his eyelids (why? did we want to see the eye or not?); plumping his pillow; unbuttoning his shirt; pouring cold water over his face with the Johnnie Walker pitcher; fitting an ice bag on his head like a tam-o’-shanter, and lightly slapping his cheeks while asking persistent questions—“Where does it hurt?” and “Can you hear me?”—to which there were no replies.

The doctor sensibly put a stop to this. “How did he get so wet?” he asked as he knelt and swiftly tinkered with Leigh’s chest and shone a light in his eyes. He held Leigh’s wrist various ways and said, “It’s too late.” It sounded like a reproach for what I had whispered to Leigh—“Maybe later.”

“A lot he cares,” said Smale, muffling what he had said with his hand and backing away from the doctor.

“Is it all right to smoke?” asked Coony. But he had already lit one, which was smoldering half-hidden in his cupped fingers.

“One of you will have to come along with me,” said the doctor, ignoring Coony’s question. The doctor was Chinese, and I think what Smale held against him was his unclinical appearance; he was wearing a bright sports shirt and Italian sandals.

Yardley and the others turned to me and became very attentive and polite, as to the next of kin, offering me the considerate sympathy they had lavished on William, as they had started calling him when he was on the sofa and, most likely, dead. We wore long faces — not sad because we liked him, but mournful because we hated him. Coony put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you okay, Jack?”

“I’ll be fine in a minute,” I said, becoming the grieving person they wanted me to be.

“If there’s anything we can do,” said Yates.

I put on my suit jacket and fixed my tie. I was dressed for a death, buttoning the black jacket over my stomach.

“What are you going to tell his wife?” asked Yardley.

I stopped buttoning. “Won’t the hospital tell her?” It had not occurred to me until Yardley mentioned it that I would have to break the news to Leigh’s wife.

“They’ll get it all wrong,” said Smale. He held my sleeve and confided, “They’ll make it sound bloody awful.”

“Don’t tell her it happened here,” said Coony quickly. “Say it happened somewhere else.”

“During the day,” said Smale. “A sunny day.”

“But in the shade,” said Coony, “of a big Angsana tree. In the Botanical Gardens. While he was—” Coony hit his fist against his head.

“While he was having a good time with the rest of us,” said Yardley. He looked from face to face.

There was a long silence. The doctor was at the bar speaking on the telephone to the hospital.

“Near the bandstand,” said Frogget. “Maybe he tried to climb that hill. And it was too hot. And his ticker gave out.”

“We told him to stop,” said Yardley, sounding convinced. “But he wouldn’t listen to us. ‘Have it your way,’ we said. So off he went—”

“I’ll think of something,” I said, cutting Yardley off. I didn’t like this.

It had all fallen to me. He was mine now, though I had tried several times to disown him. I had not wanted him; I had disliked him from the moment he asked, “Flowers… are you a ponce?” And his triumphant contempt: “How do you stand it?” and “How do you manage?” It was as if he had come all that way to ask me those questions, and to die before I could answer.

The doctor clicked Leigh’s eyes shut, moving the lids down with his thumbs; but the lids refused to stick and sightless crescents of white appeared under the lashes. We carried him to the doctor’s Volvo and folded him clumsily into the back seat. I sat beside him and put my arm around him to keep him from swaying. He nodded at every red light, and at the turning on River Valley Road his head rolled onto my shoulder.

“How long have you been in Singapore?” the doctor asked. It was a resident’s question. I told him how long. He did not reply at once; I guessed I had been there longer than him. He drove for a while and then asked when I would be leaving.

“Eventually,” I said. “Pretty soon.”

“Haven’t I seen you at the Island Club?”

“Yes,” I said. “I go there now and then, just to hack around.”

“What’s your handicap?”

“My handicap,” I said. “I wouldn’t repeat it in public.”

The doctor laughed and kept driving. Leigh slumped against me.

In my locked bedroom on Moulmein Green, late at night and so dog tired after driving one of my girls back to her house from a hotel that I collapsed into bed without pulling my pants off or saying my prayers, I had imagined death differently — not the distant horror of the drowning man, but the sense of something very close, death crowding me in the dark: a thing stirring in a room that was supposed to be empty. The feeling I got on one of those nights was associated in my mind with the moment before death, the smothering sound of the cockroach. A glossy cockroach, motionless, gummed to the wall by the bright light, goes into action when the light is switched off. It is the female which flies and its sound is the Chinese paper fan rapidly opening and closing. This fluttering dung beetle in the black room is circling, making for you. You listen in the dark and hear the stiff wings beating near your eyes. It is going to land on your face and kill you and there is nothing you can do about it.

I did not imagine a moment of vision before death, but quite the reverse, blindness and that fatal burr of wings. Leigh’s eyes were not completely closed, the lids were ajar and the sulfurous streetlamps on Outram Road lit the gleaming whites. In the General Hospital Leigh peered past the orderly who pinned an admission ticket to his shirt — number eighty-six, a lottery number for Mr. Khoo — and turned out his pockets: a few crumpled dollars, a withered chit, some loose change, a wallet containing calling cards, a picture of Margaret, a twenty-dollar Hong Kong note, and a folded receipt from the Chinese Emporium on Orchard Road. This went into a brown envelope.

“We’ll need a deposit,” said the nurse.

I took out Gunstone’s envelope, Singapore Belvedere, and handed over fifteen dollars. How do you manage?

“Please fill up this form,” she said.

The form was long and asked for information I could not provide without Leigh’s passport. So with the matron’s permission I went back to the Strand by taxi, told the desk clerk that Leigh was dead, and picked up the passport. “It seems like only yesterday that he checked in,” the desk clerk said; he assured me that he would take care of everything. By the time I was back at the hospital, copying Leigh’s full name, home address, nearest relation, race, and age — he was a year younger than me; the pen shook in my hand — Leigh was staring out of the chilly morgue drawer; after the autopsy he looked much the same, though unzipped, he fixed on that distant thing with the single eye the autopsy left him.

I had forgotten Leigh’s suitcase. After the certificate of death had been made out I picked up the case at the Strand, and at my insistence the taxi driver detoured past the Bandung. As we went past I could see lights burning and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and the others at the bar, like lost old men, vagrants huddled around a fire late at night, sharing a bottle, afraid to go to bed.

It was after midnight. I did not have the heart to wake up Leigh’s wife and get her out of bed to tell her she was a widow. I locked my door, put a match to the mosquito coil, and knelt beside it. The mosquito coil, lighted to suffocate the gnats and drive the cockroaches away, smoked like a joss stick. I blinked in the fumes and tried to pray; the first words that came to me were, Is this all?

The next day I awoke as if after a binge, with that feeling of physical and mental fragility, exposure, distraction — the knowledge of having done something shameful which refuses to be summoned up: of having revealed my closest secret which now everyone knew except me! And then I remembered Leigh, not as a corpse; it was an uncharitable intrusive thought, something connected with the smile he wore when he had asked, “How do you manage?” A picture of his dead face followed.

So more as an act of penance than out of any curiosity, I opened his suitcase and picked through it. Each thing I found made me sad; nothing was concealed. There were tags and labels on the case, the traveler’s campaign ribbons, KHAO YAI MOTOR LODGE, HOTEL BELA VISTA — MACAU, and the luggage tag from the airline with the destination lettered sin. Here was a sock with a hole in the toe, a pathetic little sewing kit, some salt tablets, a packet of Daraprim, very wrinkled pajamas with a white-piping border, his human smell still upon them. In a paper bag from the Chinese Emporium there were a set of screwdrivers, a new shaving brush, some Lucky Brand razor blades. There was a wrapped parcel of batik cloth from another shop, probably a present for his wife, and stuck to the parcel were two receipts for the cloth, but giving different prices, the lower faked price to fool the customs official in Hong Kong and avoid a few dollars’ import duty. At the bottom of the case was a detective novel with a grisly title that described Leigh’s own death, an eerie coincidence italicizing the improbable fraud of one, the pitiful condition of the other. He was in the morgue drawer, and here was his poor bundle of effects: this was all.

I dressed, practicing how to tell his wife what had happened. The suitcase caught my eye; I opened it again and sorted through it quickly, lifting everything out a second time and shaking the clothes. There was no money in it! I had told the desk clerk at the Strand he was dead, but only later picked up the suitcase. After I had left with the passport they had gone up to his room and robbed him.

The phone crackled; Hing fretted beside me; Gopi watched. I said, “Listen carefully. Yesterday I was with your husband at the Botanical Gardens. Wait a minute — listen. It was a beautiful day—”

It was a suffocating day, producing the feverish symptoms of a fatal illness in me. I had picked up my car at the garage, we had all met at the mortuary, and we followed behind the hearse — polished and sculpted like an old piano — attempting funereal solemnity by keeping our faded elderly cars in file, my chugging Renault, Yardley’s blue Anglia, Hing’s Riley (he sat in the back seat with Little; a Malay drove), Mr. Tan and Wallace Thumboo in an old Ford Consul, Yates in his boxy Austin, and the others trailing, impossible to see in my rear-view mirror. We hit every red light, getting hotter and sicker at each stop, and we lost the hearse (I could see Yardley irritably pounding his palm against the steering wheel) at one junction when it speeded up and ran on the yellow.

Gladys was with me. I had guessed in advance that only men would be there, and that didn’t seem right. Also, I had to drop her off at a hotel immediately afterward, an appointment of long standing I had only noticed that morning in my desk diary. Gladys was fanning herself absent-mindedly as I drove, and quickly against her chin at stoplights, making that fluttering I dreaded, the papery burr of beating cockroach wings. I told her to knock it off. That and the heat oppressed me. We were not in sunlight, but sweating in the mid-morning Singapore veil of dim steam that makes a gray tent of the slumping sky and nothing on the ground solid. There was nothing worse, I was thinking, than a cremation on a hot day in the tropics. It had all the inappropriateness of a man puffing on a pipe in a burning house. I vowed that I would spare myself that fate.

The crematorium off Upper Aljunied Road was a yellow building, with a chimney instead of a steeple, on a low hill, in a treeless Chinese cemetery, a rocky weedy meadow of narrow plots, stone posts as grave markers, figured like milestones turned on a lathe, an occasional angel, and worn cement vaults with peeling red doors, set in scorched hillocks: a whole suburb of trolls’ huts, clustered there in the kind of chaotic profusion that matched their lives, sleeping families on shophouse floors, and now, head to toe, beneath those posts and stones. Here and there was a high vault with a roof, fenced in from the others, the graveyard equivalent of a towkay’s mansion, which might almost have borne a nameplate, The Wongs, Chee’s Tower, or Dunroamin. All this was hazy in the steamy air and when I looked back, obscured by the dust cloud our procession of cars was raising on the road that wound up to the crematorium. The chimney was not smoking. Some distance away, in the middle of the cemetery, a ghostly white-shirted party with umbrellas open stood slightly bowed before a vault mound. They could have been praying, but they weren’t. Stooping reverentially, they began to let off firecrackers.

“Can’t they stop those little bastards?” said Yardley, rushing up to me after we parked. Our dust cloud descended, sifting down on us. He looked at Gladys and suppressed another curse. “We can’t have that nonsense going on during the service.”

The Chinese mourners were lighting packets of fifty with the fuses knotted. The noise carried in steady burps; there were flashes and delayed bangs.

“Bloody—” Yardley turned and stalked away growling.

“To amaze the gods,” Gladys said. “Very lucky to have big noise. Also can make devils piss off.”

The other fellers came over to us.

“Are you okay, Jack?” asked Coony.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” said Smale, leaning back and squinting at the sky.

We looked at him.

“It’d ruin it,” he said nervously. “Wouldn’t it?” Was he thinking of the fire that could be doused, or was it that fear of excessive gloom that fellers associate with rain at funerals?

“It won’t rain until October,” said Yates.

The two Hings were in white, their terrifying color of mourning, white cotton suits and straw hats, carrying umbrellas, looking wretched. Mr. Tan wore a black tie. Because of the appointment, Gladys wore a bright green dress and carried a large handbag; her face was a white mask with wizard’s eyes. Big Hing cracked his umbrella open, shook it, and walked in oversized shoes toward the building, holding the umbrella upright, but bouncing it as he walked. The rest of the Chinese followed him.

I asked the hearse driver what we were supposed to do. He said four of us were to carry the coffin into the chapel; the priest would take care of the rest. I objected to the word “priest” to describe an effeminate Anglican cleric of perhaps thirty, blushing in the heat, his cheeks pink, and wringing his hands by the crematorium door; in his white smocklike surplice he eyed Gladys disapprovingly, like a spinsterish intern about to check her for the clap. I beckoned to Yardley and the others and said, “Look alive.”

I had known most of them for fourteen years; I had drunk with them nearly every night at the Bandung. Only that. I had never seen them all together, assembled in daylight away from the Bandung. So I was seeing them for the first time. They were strangers who knew me. The bad light of the Bandung had been kind to Yardley’s liverish pallor, a tropical sallowness in an unlined face; Frogget looked bigger and hairier, and his tie was frayed; Yates I noticed had freckles, and his glasses had slipped down his nose from his perspiring; Smale’s hair was reddish — I had always thought of it as brown; Coony’s hair was combed straight back, the shape of his head, and his lower lip, which always protruded when his mouth was shut, was dry for once. None of them was standing straight; they were self-conscious in their suits, in unfamiliar postures, and Yardley’s leaning — one shoulder higher than the other — made him appear unwell.

It might have been the old-fashioned rumpled suits I had never seen them wear, dark gray or black, wrinkled, smelling of moth balls and spotted with mildew like soup stains: an old ill-fitting suit makes the wearer seem shy. The wrinkles were not in the usual places, the consequence of sitting or reaching, but were in unlikely places, across the chest of the jacket, pinches on the back and sleeves, drawer folds, creases from storage, the cuffs bunched up; the trousers were more faded than the jackets and this mismatching together with the seediness of the suits reminded me of something Yates had once whispered at the Bandung. “Tell me, Jack,” he said, “don’t we look like the legion of the lost?”

It seemed disrespectful to smoke near the crematorium, so we were all more edgy than usual. The hearse driver and his assistant slid the coffin out and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and myself carried it across the dusty compound to the entrance where the rest stood behind the cleric. I thought I heard Yardley mutter, “He’s damned heavy,” but he might have said, “It’s damned heavy.” It was. I was afraid we might drop it. The others had been up drinking the night before and I had not been able to sleep. I knew they were worried about dropping it too, because they were carrying it much too fast.

“Wally,” I said.

Wally stood blocking the door, looking inside, with his back to us.

“Wally!” I said again. He didn’t hear. His square head was turned away. My hands were growing moist and slipping on the chrome fixture I was holding, and I snapped, “Move it or lose it!”

He jumped out of the way, and we proceeded inside and unsteadily down the aisle, panting, the six busy overhead fans in the room of folding chairs mocking our forced solemnity with practical whirrs. We placed the coffin on a high wheeled frame at the front of the room and took our seats with the others.

After a few moments Yardley leaned over and asked, “What’s the drill?”

I shrugged. It was my first cremation, and in that bare room of steel chairs, the only ornaments the photographs of the President and his wife, I could not imagine what was going to happen. We sat expectantly, the chairs squeaking and clanking. Hing loudly cleared his throat, so loud it made me want to spit, and as one person’s hacking inspires another’s, particularly in a still room, soon Smale and Coony were at it, coughing in shallow growls. Outside, the pooppoop of firecrackers continued; and beside me Gladys began beating her fan, scraping it against her chin. The cleric walked up the aisle, his starched surplice rustling. The coughing stopped; now there were only the fans, the chair squeaks, and the distant firecrackers.

“Fellow brethren,” he said, looking at us with uncertainty and distaste; he clung to his Bible, holding it chest high, and nodded at everyone individually with his pink flushed face — making suspense. He took a breath and began. His sermon was the usual one, but he was young enough and had delivered it few enough times to make it sound as if he believed it: life was short and difficult, a testing time loaded with temptations; and he pictured God as the all-seeing bumptious neighbor, rocking irritably on his celestial porch and passing judgment. He talked about our weaknesses and then concentrated on Leigh’s soul, which he addressed with great familiarity. The worst religions, I was thinking, rob you of your secrets by reminding you that you’re all in the same sinking boat; harping on your sameness and denying you fancies and flesh and blood and visible hope, they reduce you to moaning galley slaves, manacled to a bloody oar, puking in a sunless passage and pulling blindly toward an undescribed destination; and constantly warning you that you might never arrive. “Believe in God,” the cleric was saying, and I thought, Yes, that’s easy, but does God believe in me? I liked my religion to be a private affair ashore, a fire by a stone, a smoky offering; one necessary at night, the light giving the heavens fraternal features to surprise me with the thrill of agreeable company. It was to make the authority of ghosts vanish by making holiness a friendly human act and defining virtue as joy and grace as permission granted.

“—to judgment,” the cleric was saying, and as he spoke he jerked around several times to nod at Leigh’s coffin, as if Leigh was listening as long as his corpse was whole, and needed only combustion to get him to paradise. “We are all of us sinners, wallowing in the flesh,” the cleric said. Gladys stopped fanning herself. She sniffed and began to cry; and I hoped she was not planning to repent and back out of the appointment at the Palm Grove. She was the only person weeping; the Hings were impassive and pale, Mr. Tan and Wally limply crestfallen; Yardley and the others were sweating, but the sweat ran like tears and wet their faces and was almost like grief.

My face was streaming, too, but I wasn’t crying; my thoughts were too confused for that. Leigh, alive, had reminded me of myself, and his death warned me about my own — a warning so strong it made me ignore his death for part of the time. But I was also thinking: Now he can’t tell anyone about my plans, my silk pajamas and cigars; and I felt childish relief mingled with adult sadness that he was out of the way. When the engines stop on a ship in midocean the whole ship ceases to vibrate and it makes a silence so sudden after three weeks of continual noise that you think your heart has stopped and you wonder for seconds if you’re dead. After those seconds you understand mortality, and the silence that terrified you is a comfort. Leigh’s death affected me that way, and at the cremation I felt peaceful. It seemed better that he was going to be reduced to ashes — a corpse made small and poured into a little pot was not a corpse; it was so tiny and altered you couldn’t reasonably weep over it. Cremation simulated disappearance; it really was like flight, a movement I knew well. Bodies decaying underground made people cry, but a dozen pots on a shelf, a bottled family, were uncharacteristic relics of the forgettable dead, who might have simply skipped off and left their urns behind, one apiece. Burning, as the cleric hinted — and here I agreed — was like deliverance; it was only bad on a hot day.

My thoughts stopped coming: the cleric had stopped talking. There was a clatter at the door; a scrape; a shuffle-thump, shuffle-thump. The cleric stared. We all turned. Gopi was cycling in, his shoulders heaving, making his sleeves flap. His eyes were big from the physical effort of his pedaling, and his shirt was stuck in a dark patch to his back. He took a seat at the front, alone, and he watched the coffin as if it was a magician’s box.

The cleric, who might have thought Gopi was going to interrupt with Hindu wailing, quietly resumed, “Let us pray.”

We knelt on the stone floor. Gopi had to look back to see how it was done. I was anxious for him, balanced on that wobbly knee; he managed by steadying himself on the chair next to him.

A sound of enormous wheezing filled the room as we stood; it was not ours. A clapped-out harmonium had begun asthmatically to breathe “Jerusalem” at the back of the room. Yardley and the others seemed glad to have a chance to sing, and they did so with the hoarse gusto they gave the obscene songs Frogget started at the Bandung on Saturday nights. Frogget had a fine voice, higher than one would have expected from a feller his size and (Gopi and Gladys were both weeping for Leigh — why?) all the voices rang in the room, echoing on the yellow walls and drowning the fans, the firecrackers, and even the woofing harmonium with the hymn.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

We gave the lines in the last part—Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire—the sahib’s emphasis, trilling the r in the command resolutely.

The cleric walked over to the coffin and sprinkled it and prayed out loud. I started thinking of the man out back, stoking the fire like a fry cook in clogs, stirring the coals in a black kitchen, sweating worse than we were and wiping his face on his shoulder, banging his poker on the furnace door to slam the hot ashes from the tip. What burial customs.

It was over. The cleric flung his arms into the sign of the cross, a novice’s flourish of sleeves, and blessed us and said, “Amen.” The coffin was rolled out of the room through a rear door and we all went out to our cars.

“You ready?” I asked Gladys.

Her tears had dried. She looked at me. “This short time or all day?”

Before I could answer Yardley was beside me asking, “You coming along? We’re going for a drink. The day’s a dead loss — no sense going to work.”

“I’ll be there in a little while,” I said, and seeing Hing leaving, smiled and waved him off. Hing’s face was tight; he was unused to the lecturing at Christian services and might have expected the brass band, the busloads of relatives, the banners and pennants and cherry bombs that saw a Chinese corpse to the grave.

“Short time,” said Gladys. “Where I am dropping?”

I did not reply. Yardley and Frogget faced the sky behind me. I turned to look. Smoke had started from the chimney, a black puff and ripples of stringy heat, then a gray column unimpeded by any breeze shooting straight up and enlarging, becoming the steamy air that hung over the island. Despair is simple: fear without a voice, a sinking and a screamless fright. We watched in silence, all of us. Coony ground his cigarette out and gaped; then, conscious that we were all watching the smoke, we looked away.

“Who’s paying for this?” Yardley asked.

“I am,” I said, and felt sad. But when I got into the little car with Gladys and started away, throwing the shift into second gear, I felt only relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise.