He still smarted over the presence of this negative quality in himself, but was determined not to deny it; to find instead a means of using it in an action that would be fine. At least his motives were fine. He would be doing it for them; anything that might accrue to himself would be sheer profit. He would be repaying his debt a thousandfold. Wasn’t that noble enough? In millions! Even Meggsie might be impressed.
He had an irritant, Vic, a grain of scepticism about his own nature that would not let him rest. He could never quite prevent himself from looking, on each occasion, for the little giveaway flicker in another’s eye that would warn him he had failed to get away with it; that for all his swagger, he had been sniffed out. It gave him a dark pleasure, that, which he could not account for. It was always the one person in any company who had not been taken in, who had not succumbed to the tricks he used to win people, that he was drawn to.
He went on trying to, of course. That was only natural. But with half of him he wanted them to resist.
What he was after was a truth that could not be mocked.
He had seen at once, when Mr Warrender first took him round to the kitchen to be introduced, that Meggsie was the one here that he would have to be on guard against.
‘Vic is it, eh?’ she had said, looking once and weighing him up. ‘Well, you just watch them boots, young feller, on my floor. I jest mopped it.’
These were her first words to him. He looked at the floor. It was lino in big black and white squares like a draughts board.
‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Pa assured her, but lost confidence under her glare.
He knew what she really meant because they spoke the same language.
‘Never seen a floor like that, have you, son?’ That’s what she meant. ‘Floor and boots both, I dare say. Well, the floor’s mine, I’m the boss here. As for the boots, don’t you get too big for ’em, that’s all. You may fool some people but you won’t fool me.’
It wasn’t hostile, but it was a warning. The look of amusement on her face suggested that she would be watching with interest but he could expect no quarter. She had her girls to think of. She didn’t care for boys.
He went easy with her. No good trying to get around Meggsie. She’d see through that right off. She knew the world he had come out of and she knew, because she had scrubbed them, the grime he got on the cuffs and collars of his shirts and the state of his sheets. A kind of game developed between them. It wasn’t the sort of game the Warrenders would have understood. It was a joking game, watchful on her part and contentious, but not without affection. ‘I know you, young feller, I’ve known lots a’ fellers like you. Believe me, I can read you like a book.’
So far as Meggsie was concerned, he would always be on probation. That was the nub of the thing.
Apart from Mr Warrender, to whom she was fiercely loyal, there was only one man Meggsie had any time for. This was the actor Sessue Hayakawa. Vic knew him because he had been one of his mother’s favourites too.
‘He’s a dream,’ Meggsie would tell Vic and the girls when they came bustling into the kitchen to scrape bowls.
‘I thought he was a Jap,’ Vic would say cheekily.
‘Well, ’e’s a gentleman. Which is more than can be said fer you, young feller, with them hands.’ She meant his nails weren’t clean, but he was ashamed of his big hands and hid them. ‘Yer not in the race.’
‘The Jap race,’ he said under his breath (this was for the girls), and giggled. But the girls were not amused. A year back they would have been, but only Ellie laughed now, out of loyalty, and he felt oafish.
‘He’s suaaave,’ Meggsie told them, and Vic had a vision of the sleek, cruel, broodingly attentive lover she must dream of, who stood at the furthest possible distance from what she had known in the flesh. From ‘fellers’, as she would have put it, ‘round here’.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘yes, but she’s never had to change his sheets.’
‘What does Meggsie think of her dreamboat now?’ he wrote home after the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, still smarting, long after, from the snub he had felt and the disadvantage she had put him at in front of Lucille. But it would be four years before he got his answer.
III
1
THE EARLY DAYS at Changi were all idleness and neglect. The Japs, caught out by the suddenness of the collapse and the falling into their hands of so many thousands, had no idea as yet what to do with them. Left to their own devices, they did nothing. Even Doug, after his first picnic vision of it, fell quiet and was depressed.
To Digger it was terrible. The daily hanging about in irregular groups, the looseness, the disorder: sudden outbreaks of rebellious anger, then periods when the whole place seemed ghostly and they were struck, all of them, with the sleeping sickness.
The time they were in, like the unenclosed space of the camp, was limitless. Without boundaries it had no meaning. Young fellows who only weeks before had been full of fight and spirit, setting up races with one another, or boxing, or riding out on bicycles to the Happy World to have their fortunes told and play rough and find girls, shuffled about now like old men in a hospital yard, sucking fags, swapping rumours, feeding petty grievances. They neglected everything: let a grain of rice fall for the flies to swarm over; at the latrines were too lazy to cover their shit. Their insides went liquid. Everything they ate turned to slime.
This was despondency in its physical form, so childish and shameful that grown men wept at it. ‘I hate this,’ Digger told himself. ‘It’s worse than anything.’ It was the sun scrambling their brains. It was lack of activity. It was the shame and desperation they felt at being sold out by the higher-ups. It was the failure of the officers to impose order. It was their native slackness and refusal to accept authority — those were the theories.
But slowly, as the days went by, a kind of order began to emerge. It was rudimentary enough, a simpler version of the old one, but it grew in such fits and starts and bits and pieces that you could make nothing of it.
Makeshift shelters began to appear, flimsy affairs knocked up from whatever the men could scrounge. Cook-houses were established. Three times a day food was doled out, rice and a few vegetables with maybe a lump of fish in it, and you spent a good hour sometimes hanging about in lines. A few of the officers, who still had faith in the civilising power of education and saw in the enforced idleness and boredom of the lower ranks an opportunity that might never recur, set up a school. They had textbooks, and a blackboard and chalk. They called themselves a university and gave lectures on all sorts of things. Digger went along once and heard a talk on Ancient Rome — the monetary reforms of the emperor Diocletian. Another time it was the Soviet Union, but that occasion ended in a ding-dong battle over Stalin’s pact with Hitler, and the anger on both sides was murderous.
Mac tried to talk Digger into doing French. They sweated over a lesson or two, but learning a language would take years, even Mac saw that, and they had no idea what they would be doing next week.
‘You’d be better off learnin’ bloody Japanese,’ Doug told them. ‘On’y I don’t s’pose they’re bloody offerin’ that. Bad for morale.’
Standing in line one day, waiting for his issue of rice, Digger found himself addressed by a fellow he had never seen before. He was muttering. All Digger had done was turn his head a little to see who it was.
‘They’re all bloody thieves in this camp,’ the boy told him passionately. ‘I lost a fucken good fountain-pen. Some bastard swiped it straight outa me pack!’