“They’d just started to put the drains in these apartments when the Japs came,” he said. “This is the only one they finished. The other five are still empty. After all this time and with a housing shortage, too! What a country! I had to bribe the whole of the city hall before I could even get the water turned on.”
He opened the door and we went in.
My spirits had been drooping a little as we mounted the stairs, and I was remembering the camp bed I had so confidently given away; but inside things were different. There was a small tiled hall with a kitchen leading off it and another door into the sitting room. This was long and narrow, but almost the whole of the outer wall was taken up by french windows leading on to a deep terrace with a concrete balustrade. Over the terrace there was a plaited bamboo sun roof and, at the sides, attap screens. There was not much furniture; apart from the usual bamboo long chairs and a divan that was clearly used as the spare bed, there was a radio, a portable phonograph, a bookcase full of paper-backed novels and a bamboo serving trolley with drinks on it. On the walls were some Balinese pictures. It was cool and comfortable. I said so.
“The girl-friend helped me fix it up.” He started the ceiling fan going very slowly. “Got to watch this bastard. Don’t switch it on too quickly or it’ll blow the main fuses down on the floor below. Now, what’s it to be, Steve? Drink first or shower first? I’ll tell you what. We’ll have a long drink first while I show you where everything is. Then we’ll shower and go on from there. What’ll it be? Brandy dry? Gin fizz? Scotch if you like, but if you want to stay on the same thing all the evening, brandy or gin are easier. I’ll go and get the ice.”
When he had made the drinks, he showed me his bedroom and then took me out on to the terrace. It faced north, and from one end you could see out over the funnels and masts of the shipping in the port and across the bay. Beyond one of the attap screens at the other end was a Dutch bathhouse with a big stone ewer of water and a galvanised iron scoop.
“What do you know about it?” he demanded. “My word! Fancy putting a thing like that in a new building.”
“Some people say it’s the best sort of shower there is.”
“Not me. Sloshing the water all over yourself with a thing like a saucepan, when you could pipe it up another four feet to a sprinkler-it’s crazy! Besides, you have to be a bloody contortionist to rinse the soap off all over. The can’s okay though-ordinary civilised type. Last place I had, it was practically the old pole-over-the-pit.”
“How long have you been here, Roy?”
“In this country? Four years. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot I like about it besides the fat salary they pay me. But they’re a funny lot. For instance, all these things they’re getting now, like cars and fridges and radios, they don’t look on them just as things to use. They wear them like lucky charms. Doesn’t matter if the thing’s any use to them or not, or even if it works. They’ve got to have it to feel all right. Abdul saw an American wearing a gold wrist-watch in a movie, so he had to have a gold wrist-watch. He starved himself for three months to pay for it. Why? He never looks at the time, he doesn’t wind the bloody thing, he’s not even particularly proud of it. It’s just his. They’re mostly like that, and that’s what fools you. You think they’re simply a lot of show-off kids trying to ape western civilisation.”
“Until one day you find out that they’re not simple at all, and that you haven’t ever begun to understand them.”
“Too right. You know, when I was new here, I once asked a bunch of them at the airport what they thought was the most serious crime a man could commit. Know what they said?”
“Not murder anyway. They think we’re too fussy about that.”
“No, not murder. To steal another man’s wife, that was the worst, they thought.”
“I’ve never heard that one before.”
“Neither had I. I didn’t know then that it’s no use asking questions in this country. You only get the answer they think you want to hear. During the war my wife went off with another man. I’d just divorced her. Those jokers happened to have found out, that’s all.” He grinned. “You married, Steve?”
“Not any more. Same story.”
He nodded. “Mina’ll fix you up all right.”
“Who’s she?”
“The girl-friend. Tell you what. You have the shower first. I’ll go and call her up now and tell her to bring a friend along.”
It was dark when we went down into the square again and the whole place had come to life. There were people everywhere. The casuarina trees and travellers’ palms which ringed the gardens in the centre were festooned with lights, and market stalls had been set up beneath them. Chinese food-sellers surrounded by little groups of eaters squatted in the dust. A boy of about ten sat on his haunches playing a bamboo xylophone, while another beside him beat a drum. The road which ran round the square was jammed with crawling cars, and the betjak drivers rang their bells incessantly as they manoeuvred their brightly painted tricycles through the gaps. It was a tribute to the wealth and influence of the Selampang black-market operators that, in a city where the cheapest American car cost three times as much as it cost in Detroit, there should be a modern traffic problem.
There was a line of empty betjak by the Air House entrance and, as soon as he saw Jebb, one of the drivers swung out of the line and pedalled up to us, smiling eagerly.
“We need two this evening, Mahmud.”
“I can take both, tuan.”
“Maybe you can, sport, but we want to be comfortable. Where’s your friend?”
Another driver was summoned and we set off.
Once you have learned to disregard the laboured breathing of the driver pedalling behind you and have overcome the feeling that you are the sitting target for every approaching car, the betjak is an agreeable form of transport, especially on a hot night. You are carried along just fast enough for the air to seem cool, but not so fast that the sweat chills on your body. You can lean back comfortably and look up at the trees and the stars without being bitten by insects; and, providing the driver does not insist on muttering obscene invitations to the nearest brothel in your ear, you can think.
I was glad of the respite. After the Tangga hills Selampang was suffocatingly humid, and even a light cotton shirt seemed like a blanket. Also, I had had three large brandies at the apartment; one more than I really wanted. I would be busy the following day and had no intention of burdening myself with a hangover. I had no intention either, I told myself, of spending the night with some local drab selected by Jebb’s girl-friend. I had heard his telephoned instructions, and decided that there was a point at which hospitality became officiousness. Besides, the breaking of a habit of continence, especially if it has been enforced, should not be too casually enjoyed. I had my own ideas about the occasion, and they did not, at that moment, include Selampang.
The New Harmony Club was outside the city. Beyond the race track there was a stretch of about a mile of straight, unlighted road, with large bungalow compounds on either side of it. It was very quiet on this road, and you could hear an approaching car almost as soon as you saw its lights. Even the cicadas seemed muted, and we had left behind the smell of the canals.
“Nice part this,” Jebb said; “as long as you’re not too near the race track.” The two betjak were travelling abreast now.
“Who lives here?”
“Foreign legations mostly. One or two rich Chinese. They have to pay through the nose for the privilege though. Look, there’s the club. That light ahead. Shove it along, Mahmud! We need a drink.”
It was a bungalow much like the rest, but with an electric sign by the entrance to the compound, and a gatekeeper in a peaked cap who peered at us intently as we turned in. As we stopped, the warm, humid air seemed to close in again, but now it was heavily scented by the frangipani growing in the forecourt; and from inside came the lush, sentimental, international sound of a night-club pianist playing American music.
In the vestibule a Chinese doorman in a sharkskin dinner jacket made out a temporary membership card for me, and sold me a pack of American cigarettes at double the black-market price. Then, we went through into the room beyond.
Once it had been two rooms, but arched openings had been cut in the old dividing wall to make it one. There was a teak-panelled bar at one end and a platform with the piano on it in an alcove. The rest of the space inside was filled with tables, about a dozen of them. Out on the covered terrace there were a few more tables and a small raised dance floor. The walls were painted to imitate stonework, and the light came from electric candles in
