He glimpsed it now, but vaguely, because the music confused him with self-pity, reminding him that no letter from Pauline had come for a fortnight, and no news from Mimi either; and he couldn’t envisage a future beyond the dark escarpments of Gunong Barat.
He hadn’t seen Mimi for several weeks, in fact, and through the hard and alternating watches (increased day-work because bombers patrolled the jungle on square-searches, termed exercise) he pondered on specific reasons for it. The widow, she said, had been told of his visits and threatened to throw her out if he came there again because she didn’t like English airmen invading the sacred territory of her house. Or is Mimi making this up to put me off? There was no way of knowing, and brooding gets you nowhere. Sooner or later the good things end, your troubles start. Only for so long can you think the world is a lovely place to be in, until with a couple of mild hits between the eyes it reminds you that you don’t count as to whether it’s good or not. Some invisible thug takes you by the shoulders and shakes you this way and that, roaring all the time: “You’re alive, you stiff-necked jumped-up bastard. You’re alive, I’m telling you. And here’s summat to let you know it.” You’re left tottering, trying to see what’s wrong and put things right, when underneath all you want to do is crawl away and sleep while the trouble and bother works itself out — die, in other words. I should have known things would go this way with us, but that’s the trouble about being slow on the uptake, because I didn’t do anything to stop the rot setting in.
Her silence hit him like a double hammerblow of optimism and despair, a carpenter’s pendulum to stop you doing anything, yet keep you living. Where do you go from the highest point of passion? To sustain it into love would have meant seeing her more often, which, because he was a prisoner, was impossible. He reached the agony of believing that perhaps he had wanted the break to come, because the toil and emotional fight needed to sustain what he may have imagined to be there in the first place was too much for his diminishing energy in the blood-boiling north of Malaya. Maybe she just doesn’t want to see me and that’s that.
Granted that what the eye didn’t see the heart couldn’t grieve, he realized he was nevertheless doing the dirty of the rottenest sort on Pauline, thought of her often from his far-removed and new-cut stomping grounds of Kota Libis, knowing that while opportunity offered he hadn’t the will to do more or less than accept it. He had neither felt nor heard any angel of moral injury on his silent expeditions through the Patani darkness and swamps to see Mimi, and as long as he didn’t wonder whether or not Pauline was playing the same trick on him, he hardly thought to explore the unfaithful pointers of his own actions. But he was eventually pushed into considering such a possibility when the idea that Mimi could be betraying him crept into his mind. And this was such an enraging idea that he forgot about his injury to Pauline (and maybe hers to him) as soon as it was broached, detesting Mimi for a betrayal he could never have proof of.
Mimi was strange to him because her one-sided character appeared so complete. Her chief trait seemed one of a lassitude so overpowering that his only reaction to it was anger. He saw no way in which they could really and finally meet in love, his immediate dark reason for this being that they were too much strangers to each other, having been born and reared in different parts of the world. I understood Pauline, he told himself, so why shouldn’t I get through to Mimi? Still, some women are harder to get to know than others — and don’t I know it? — for I was four years with Pauline before we had to run down to the Registry Office and get spliced up. Mimi is too passive, and I want somebody to grind myself to bits on maybe. Don’t be a loon: all you want is to shag yourself silly, you know you do; what brains you’ve got dive overboard as soon as you get a woman hot and undressed in bed. Mimi’s doing it on you, and it’s looped your vanity in a half-nelson. You thought you were all set to make a go of it, live it up for good perhaps, get married maybe (after you’d ditched Pauline, you foul bastard), and fill her with a few kids. Well, think on it: you’ll be back in England in six months and then where will you be with all this humming and aahing? Who knows where I’ll be in six months? I could walk away from this wireless set, tread on a snake outside the door, and be dead before I knew where I was. So all that crap about the future wain’t wash; except I suppose I’ll be back in England soon and loving it up with marvellous understandable Pauline.
Life on the camp was boring between morse and map-making. Twenty-five dollars a week at eight to the pound was only enough to keep him in cigarettes and odd meals at the canteen, so he couldn’t dazzle himself with the expensive lights of Palau Timur more than once a month. No wonder Mimi’s fed up with me, he reasoned. If dad could send me a few quid every week — like some blokes get — I’d be able to jazz things up a bit. The poor bogger needs every penny for himself, even though he is at work. I don’t expect the couple o’ bob a day I allow Pauline would make much difference to my whooping it up either, because she could do with it, as well as the odd food parcel I’m able to post off now and again.
The camp cinema had been six weeks closed because the rickety equipment had given out. It was so old they must have got it from the scrap-heap outside some shut-down flea-pit. You could go, of course, to the Nanking Talkies in the village, but it was a dead loss hearing Rin-Tin-Tin barking in Chinese and the man on Movietone News ringing his bell in Hindustani three months out of date, and seeing joss-smoke billowing from Buck Jones’s ivory-handled guns. So he’d sit in the billet, reading for hour after hour until his concentration snapped and he was ready to argue with anyone who happened to be about. No one believed in God, he found, and most would vote Labour if they were old enough. Getting them to admit a monarchy useless proved easy, and from then on, it wanted only half an hour to win them over to a form of Communism terrifying in its simplicity. At the apogee of his boredom he found himself possessed by a wild and compelling gift of the gab, would sit on the end of his bed and talk talk talk on any subject that came into his head, spouting without effort and only realizing afterwards that the boys had actually been listening with enjoyment, had been influenced by his voice, laughing when he said something amusing and nodding in agreement when he came out with the extreme breath of revolution. They’ll believe anything when they’re bored, he saw, exhausted from his peroration, pleased at himself as he fell asleep over his book.
Baker sent paper aeroplanes flying from his bed, happy when they found landing-grounds on somebody’s book, letter, or face. He captured a large dung-beetle that hovered clumsily around the lights, imprisoned it in a matchbox while searching through his locker for a length of cotton. “Don’t hang it,” somebody shouted. “It looks a strong bastard: make it work.” He tied the cotton to the beetle’s back leg and the other end to one of his paper aeroplanes. “There’s no life in the bloody place,” Baker shouted as he released the beetle. With a buzz like the roar of a minute engine, it soared through the open door and lost itself in the trees. “Funny bastard,” a voice said.
Brian was calm, halfway through a novel and wanting to finish it, but Baker was in a hard, useless, destructive mood. Someone put “Hora Staccato” on the gramophone, but Baker ripped it off and skimmed it out of the door so that it shattered against a tree. He then sat by the pile of records and slew the fifty of them after “Hora Staccato”—looking at each label before committing it to smithereens. No one thought the records good enough to save, as they were all of tuneless tunes out of the good old days.