She reminded him of something he’d never told her and didn’t know she knew: “You’ve got a wife and child waiting for you in England,” and the shock was so great that no quick lie came to his rescue. He sat with mouth closed and a grim stare in his eyes. “You thought I didn’t know!” He was surprised at her treating as flippant a piece of deception that a Radford woman might have choked him for. “I’ve known for months. I happened to be dancing one night with someone from Kota Libis who told me all about you. I thought you knew I knew. You never bothered to tell me you were married, out of kindness, I imagined.”
“That’s true,” he said, a little too quickly, though sensing that the river of gaiety loped around them by the dance hall was coming to the end of its tether, about to lay down its head and die — except that there was no diminution in the machine-like power of the band. Mimi’s motionless expression was one of unhappiness, and he felt miserable and guilty that he hadn’t kept his trap shut — or at least hadn’t opened it in the right way — and spent the six tickets on spinning themselves off their feet.
He pulled her into the perspiring drink-smelling mix-up of the dance-floor, giving in to the honky-tonk jazz of the Boston Stumpers. Her hands rested lightly, as if she were a taxi-dancer approached for the first time. His movements while dancing were those of some sailor who had never taken lessons, and he used the same erratic and exaggerated steps for all rhythms. Yet their bodies moved together and he drew her slowly to him. With a sudden movement, she clung firmly, as if some inner vision frightened her. “Brian,” she faltered, “don’t go, will you?”
“No.” They pressed warmly together, close to the dark night of each other. His arm was so far around her waist that his fingers touched the under-part of her breast. Noise and music were forgotten, stranded in a world they had sidestepped from, its fabricated rhythms alien and unmatched compared to the swaying cutoff warmth of themselves. He felt the shape and benefit of her body, thighs intertwining at each step, shoulders and breasts against his. “I love you,” he said. “I feel as though I’ve lived with you for years, for a life.”
“Don’t say that. It’s not finished yet, is it?”
He kissed her closed eyes: “What are you crying for?”—misery back and making a lump of stone in his guts, impossible to get rid of because space for it had been there since birth, it seemed. Her forehead creased and lips twisted into a childlike ugliness that she tried to hide. A haze of noise and whisky defeated him, turned easily back the sudden though matter-of-fact intrusions of traffic and ships’ hooters from beyond the world of the Boston Lights. Into it came Knotman, framed at the far door with his gorgeous bint — a black flower, smiling as they pushed a pathway to the bar. Mimi and Brian went into another dance, and were drawn tightly to each other: “You’re making me dizzy,” she protested. “I’ll be sick.”
“Save it for the ferry. Are you going back with me?”
“You know I am.”
They were cheerful by the end of the dance, stayed on for another. “You’re thinner than when I first knew you,” she said. “Your bones are sticking out.”
“That’s your fault; you’re like a magnet and they’re trying to get at you.”
“You’re crazy,” she laughed. “It’s impossible.”
“Crazy,” he said, “like a blind, three-legged blackclock.”
“What’s a blackclock?”
“A cockroach. An English shit-beetle.”
“Do they have them in England as well?”
“Sure they do. They have snakes in England, jungle and wild animals and mountains. Cities and swamps and big rivers. You look as if you don’t believe me? Well, I can’t prove it this minute, but it’s true, right enough.”
“If it is, why do you want to stay in Malaya?”
“Because”—even if you don’t have an answer, make one up, a lie being better than no answer at all. If when he was a kid his brothers or cousins had asked: What is the biggest town in Australia? he’d rather have said Paris than I don’t know. “Because I love you.”
But still the tears came, for no lie could stop them, nor even the truth, since what he had said was certainly somewhere between both. “When I was told you had a wife in England I didn’t believe it. I thought the man was lying or having me on. But now you’ve told me as well, it must be true.” He winced at the delayed action of her trick, unable to answer the cunning of a fine ruse played as much against herself as him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but it was too late. He had lifted her from a passive sort of contentment, and understood that she couldn’t forgive him. “I’ll stay,” he said. “I want to. I can’t do anything else,” and while they were dancing he imagined them living in some house like the Chinese widow’s, on the edge of the Patani swamps, where bullfrogs and night noises rolled an extinguishing carpet over her senses, an oblivious rest for them both from the strident thump and blare of the band that was beginning to send him off his nut.
The next morning those who had been on the Gunong Barat expedition were awakened at five o’clock. The hand of a police sergeant from the guard-room shook Brian out of the death-cells of sleep, lifted the millstone of exhaustion from his head. He’d been home with Mimi and stayed till two, had run the gauntlet of roadblocks between the village and camp, thankful at reaching his bed with no marks of buck-shot on him. It was a feat of tracking, often on all fours by beach and footpath to avoid the groups of Malays who sat smoking and telling tales to each other, alerted for any bandit gang, of whom Brian might have been one. It’s getting worse, he had told himself. If I don’t get shot by mistake, they’ll report me to the guard-house for being out without a pass. I feel like a Chetnik freedom-fighter; or I would with a gun to blaze back with if they tried owt.
“Get up,” the sergeant said. “Out of that wanking pit. There’s a job for you jungle lads to do.”
“What’s going off?” Brian suspected a practical joke. “It’s still dark.”
“A plane’s crashed and you’ve got to go after it.” He stirred Kirkby, Baker, Jack, and a boy from Cheshire. “Come on, get yer hands off it. The ship’s going down.”
Brian sat up, but made no move to get out of bed, while Knotman walked along the billet already dressed: “Get weaving. We’ve got to help those poor bastards down. They’re fixing lorries and wireless gear at the MT section.” Brian pulled his trousers on: “Why did the daft bastards have to crash at a time like this? I’ve never felt so knackered in my life.”
“I suppose you’re getting as much of it in as you can,” Knotman said, “before they drag you screaming down to that boat at Singapore.”
“I wish that was what they was waking me up for this morning.”
Knotman threw him a fag. “I’ll go over to signals in a bit and find out where it pancaked.”
The sergeant returned: “Look sharp. Get over to the cookhouse and they’ll give you some breakfast and rations.”
“How long do they expect us to be away?” Baker wanted to know.
“How do I know, laddie?” the sergeant cried. “I’ll get God on the blower and find out, if it means that much to you.”
“It does,” Baker said. “We’re on the boat in a couple of weeks.”
“GET WEAVING!” he shouted. “Or you’ll be over the wall for fifty-six days, never mind on the bloody boat.” They went down the steps and walked off through the palm-trees to a leisurely meal, still finding time to hang around in the billet afterwards. Brian was impatient. “They’re fixing the radio,” Knotman explained. “I got on to the DF hut and the plane ducked thirty miles south, they think.”