War and Remembrance Read online

  “Oh, dear. Poor, poor Dad!” Madeline struck a little fist on the sofa. “She’d no more have divorced Hugh! I should never have written. I just panicked, because I was so astounded at her accusations.”

  “Write him again, dear. Tell him that it was all nonsense.”

  “I intend to.” With a huge yawn, Madeline stood up. “Sime is sort of sweet, you know? So crushed, so obliging! If I asked him to cut off his own head, he’d fetch an axe and do it. Boring, actually.”

  “Do go and call Mr. Cleveland, Madeline.”

  The daughter went out. Later Hugh Cleveland called again. The phone rang and rang until Rhoda answered. She went to her daughter’s room and shouted at her through the bath door, over the sound of gushing water, to take the call.

  “What the Christ does he want?” Madeline yelled. “I can’t be bothered. Tell him I’m covered with soap.”

  Cleveland said he would wait until Madeline dried herself.

  “Oh, Jesus! Tell him I like to soak myself for half an hour before I go to bed. This is outrageous, pestering me at half past two in the morning!”

  “Madeline, I’ll NOT go on with this idiotic bellowing through a door. Dry yourself and come out.”

  I WONT. And if he doesn’t like it, tell him I quit, and to kindly go and hang himself.”

  “Hello? Mr. Cleveland? Better wait until morning. She’s truly in a very bad mood.”

  “He’ll call you in the morning,” she carolled, her teasing singsong conveying Madeline’s victory.

  “I couldn’t care less,” Madeline sang back.

  Rhoda tossed in the darkness for almost an hour, then got up, fetched a writing pad and pen, and sat up in bed.

  Dearest Pug —

  I could write forty pages, expressing how I feel about you, and our life together, and the wonderful letter you’ve written me, but I’ll keep this short. Of one thing I’m sure. You’re mighty busy now!

  First of all, Madeline. It’s a long story, but the nub of it is she was frightened by an utterly false accusation and an utterly scurrilous threat. I’m sure she’s innocent of any wrong-doing. She’s come to stay with me for Christmas, so I don’t feel totally alone, and I must say she’s turned into quite the spiffy New York gal. Believe it or not, Sime Anderson still dances attendance! He took her out tonight. She’s in excellent control of her situation, and you can put that problem out of your mind.

  If you can do it, please put me out of your mind, too, for the next few months, except as the little old lady back home. You have a war to fight. What I said in my last letter still goes, but there’s this horrible time lag in our correspondence, and we just can’t thrash anything out this way. I’ve been around a long time, and I’m not going to do anything drastic. When you get back, I’ll be right here in Foxhall Road, waiting like a good Navy wife in my best bib and tucker, with a full martini jug.

  I cried when I read your offer to forget my letter and go on as before. That’s like you. It’s almost too generous to accept, and we both ought to take time to think about it. It may well be that I’m “not a schoolgirl,” and that I’ve actually been going through a sort of middle-aged “hot flash.” I’m doing my best to “sort myself out,” right down to the bottom. That you would be willing to forgive me is almost inconceivable — to anyone who doesn’t know you as I do. Believe me, I have never respected and loved you more or been more proud than when I read your letter.

  There’s no news yet about Natalie and her baby, is there? None here. Please send any news of Byron. Love to Warren, Janice, and little Vic —

  And of course, and forever to you —

  Rho

  Having written this, and meant every word of it, Rhoda turned out the light and slept the sleep of the just.

  9

  POUNDING at the door.

  The floor of the old Raffles Hotel bedroom shook as Pamela went running out, fumbling a negligee around her. “Who is it?”

  “Phil Rule.”

  She opened the door and got a shock.

  She had last seen him on the morning after the Japanese attack, all nervy and dashing in jungle war rig, about to fly a rented private plane to the front. Rule was a sport flyer, and in pursuing a combat story he could be foolhardy. He had first fascinated Pamela during the Spanish Civil War with tales of his wild plane flights; his romantic yarns salted with Marxist rhetoric had put her in mind of Malraux. Now he was sodden wet, his hair hung in strings, his unshaven face was gaunt and hollow-eyed, and his bandaged hand was horribly swollen. Beside him, just as drenched, a short hard-faced army officer with iron-gray hair slapped a dripping swagger stick on a palm.

  “My God, Phil! Come in.”

  “This is Major Denton Shairpe.”

  Tudsbury limped out of his bedroom in droopy yellow silk pajamas. “Bless me, Philip, you’re drowned,” he yawned.

  “There’s a cloudburst outside. Can you give us some brandy? Penang has fallen. We’ve just come from there.”

  “Good Christ, Penang? No.”

  “Gone, I tell you. Gone.”

  “Are they that far south? Why, that island’s a fortress!”

  “It was. All Malaya’s falling. It’s an utter rout, and your broadcasts are criminal lies. Why in Christ’s name are you sucking up to the mendacious incompetent bastards who’ve botched this show and probably lost the Empire — not that it was worth saving?”

  “I’ve told the truth, Phil.” Tudsbury’s face flushed as he handed the two men glasses of brandy. “Such as I could find out.”

  “Bollocks. It’s been a lot of Rule Britannia gooseberry jam. Malaya’s gone, gone!”

  “I say, jolly good brandy!” The major’s voice was astonishingly high and sweet, almost like a girl’s. “Don’t mind Phil, he’s got the wind up. He’s never been through a retreat like this. Malaya isn’t gone. We can still defeat these little bastards.”

  “Denton was on General Dobbie’s staff,” Rule said hoarsely to Tudsbury. “I don’t agree with him, but listen to him! He’ll give you something to broadcast.”

  Pamela went into her room for a bathrobe because Philip Rule kept staring at the thin silk over her breasts and thighs.

  “Do you have a map of Malaya about?” Shairpe piped, as Tudsbury refilled his glass.

  “Right here.” Tudsbury went and lit a hanging lamp over a wicker table in mid-room.

  Using his swagger stick as a pointer on the map, Shairpe explained that this campaign had all been foreseen. He had himself helped to plan General Dobbie’s staff exercises. Years ago they had predicted where the Japs would probably land for an invasion, and how they would advance. Dobbie had even staged a mock invasion during the monsoon, to prove its feasibility. But nobody in the present Malaya Command seemed aware of the Dobbie studies. Indian and British troops in the north, caught off guard in a wild night storm, had retreated pell-mell from the Japanese beachhead. The Japs had come on fast. Fixed fall-back positions around Jitra, built and stocked to hold out for a month, had fallen in hours. Since then the army had been stumbling backward without a plan.

  Moreover, the troops were weakly dispersed over the peninsula — Shairpe flicked the stick here and there — to protect airfields foolishly sited by the RAF without consulting the army. Their defense could not be coordinated, and several fields had already fallen. So the Japs had taken control of the air. Furthermore, they had tanks. There was not one British tank in Malaya. The War Office in London had decided that tanks would be useless in jungle warfare. Unfortunately, Shairpe said in dry high nasal tones, the Japanese had not been informed of this piece of wisdom. Though their tanks were poor stuff, they were punching along unopposed, panicking the Asiatic troops. Antitank obstacles were piled in Singapore, but nobody was putting them in place.

  With all this the defenders still had the edge, Shairpe insisted. Three Jap divisions had landed. The British could muster five, with plenty of air and ground reinforcements on the way. The Japs were well trained for jungle war — lightly dresse
d, able to live on fruits and roots, equipped with thousands of bicycles for fast movement down captured roads — but Japan was attacking all over the Pacific; and most likely this landing force had to live and fight on whatever supplies it had brought or could seize. If the defenders would scorch the earth, and force the invaders with delaying actions to use up their food, fuel, and bullets on the long march south, the attrition in time would halt them. They could then be destroyed.

  Shairpe showed on the map where strong fall-back defenses ought to exist. General Dobbie’s report had called for building these in peacetime. It hadn’t been done — a major folly — but there was still time. The material lay ready in warehouses. A labor pool of two million Chinese and Malayans, who all hated and dreaded the Japs, was available. They could do the work in a week or ten days. Two very strong lines were needed, close in: one in Johore on the other side of the strait, the other along the north shore of Singapore Island itself, with underwater obstacles, petroleum pipes, searchlights, pillboxes, barbed wire, machine gun nests —

  “But that’s been done,” Tudsbury interrupted him. “The north shore’s already impregnable.”

  “You’re wrong,” Shairpe replied, his oddly girlish voice roughened by brandy. “There’s nothing on the north shore of this island but marsh.”

  After a pop-eyed pause, Alistair Tudsbury said, “I saw massive fortifications there myself.”

  “You saw the outer walls of the base. They’re to keep out busybodies. The base is not a defensible strong point.”

  “Are you telling me that the BBC has been lied to, by the highest officials in Singapore?”

  “Oh, my dear fellow, the BBC’s a propaganda channel. One uses you. That’s all I’m here for. I hope you can somehow get the Malaya Command cracking.” Shairpe thinly smiled and slapped the stick on his palm. “Phil says you’ve a heart of oak, and all that sort of thing. The Empire’s teetering in the balance, Tudsbury. That’s not journalism. That’s a military fact.”

  Tudsbury stared at this calm, wet, powerfully convincing officer. “All right. Can you come back about nine this morning?” He was limping about the room in agitation. “I’ll stay up all night to draft this story. Then I want you to vet it.”

  “Really? Nine o’clock? Jolly good! Keen to help.”

  “But you’ve got to shield Denton,” Rule put in, “even if they twist your balls in red-hot clamps.”

  Shairpe left. Rule asked if he might stay and doze in an armchair. He meant to go to a hospital at first light.

  “Look, get off those wet clothes. Hang them up and have a bath,” Tudsbury said. “Then use the extra bed in my room.”

  “Thanks awfully. I do stink all over. At Jitra we went wading through bogs. I had to pick forty leeches off myself. Filthy little horrors!”

  “What’s happened to your hand?” Pamela said. “It looks awful.”

  “Oh, an imbecile army medico lanced it at Jitra.” Rule gave the hand a miserable, worried glance. “I hope I don’t lose it. I may have a touch of blood poisoning, Pam. I’m shaking from head to foot.”

  Pamela smiled. With all his daredeviling, Rule had always been a hypochondriac. Tudsbury asked, “Where’s your plane, Phil?”

  “The Malacca airfield. We caught an army lorry from there. They wouldn’t refuel me. Denton and I flew there from Penang. We had to beat people off the plane at Penang, Talky, and I mean white people. Army officers, in fact!”

  Pamela drew a bath and laid out fresh towels, but then she found him asleep in his clothes. She took off his boots and outer uniform, which had a foul swampy odor, and tucked the mosquito netting about him. As she rolled him about, he muttered in his sleep.

  Memories assailed her. Up till now, here in Singapore, he had been the ex-lover: older, sleekly flirtatious, repellent. But this big worn-out dishevelled blond man, lying asleep in his dank underwear with everything showing, seemed much more the Phil Rule of Paris days. Russian wife and all, at least he was not ordinary! In Paris he had always been — in his jagged and tormenting fashion — fun.

  “What the devil, Pamela?” Tudsbury called. “Get at the typewriter and let’s go.”

  Stumping here and there, waving his arms, he dictated a broadcast called “Conversation with a Defeatist.” At the Golf Club, he recounted, he had talked with a crusty old retired army colonel, full of alarmist opinions. Denton Shairpe’s views came out as this old carper’s words. Defeatism tended to conjure up such nightmares, Tudsbury pointed out, and the story showed a human side of the Singapore defenders. He himself was sure that the fixed defense lines existed, that the fighting retreat was going wholly according to plan, and that the north shore of Singapore Island was a bristling death trap. This episode merely proved that free speech still prevailed in Fortress Singapore, that democracy in Malaya remained self-confident.

  When he finished, Pamela opened the blackout curtain. The sky was gray. Rain was still coming down hard.

  “Adroit, what?” her father asked, when she failed to comment. “Tells the story, yet they can’t fault me.”

  She said, rubbing her eyes, “You’ll never get away with it.”

  “We’ll see. I’m going to catch an hour’s sleep.”

  Major Shairpe, much spruced up and wearing a pith helmet, arrived on the dot of nine. Making a few small rapid corrections on the script in pencil, he piped, “I say, you’ve got the hell of a retentive memory, Tudsbury.”

  “Long practice.”

  “Well, it’s a smasher. Most ingenious. Congratulations! Hope it has some effect. I shall be listening for it up-country. Jolly glad Phil got me to come.”

  Pamela dropped the script at the censor’s office and went shopping. Buyers were crowding in and out of the stores, mostly run by Chinese, and still crammed with peacetime goods at far cheaper prices than in London — silk lingerie, jewelry, gourmet food and wines, kid gloves, elegant shoes and purses. But in nearly every store there now hung a copy of the same sign, newly printed in vaguely Oriental red lettering: Cash Only Please — No More Charge Accounts or Chits.

  “Is that you, Pam?” Tudsbury called as she dropped her bundles on the map table.

  “Yes. Any news?”

  “Rather. I’ve been summoned to Government House.” He emerged from his room freshly shaved and ruddy, in a white linen suit and a rakishly tilted hat, with a pugnacious gleam in his eye. “Berlin all over again!”

  “Did Phil ever wake up?”

  “Long since. He left a note in your bedroom. Cheerio!”

  Rule had written in childish block letters: “Excuse left hand printing luv. Appreciate thoughtfulness mosquito netting. Sorry you had to put on bathrobe due my sudden attack of memory and desire. My hand’s killing me. A toi, Malraux.”

  She threw the note into a wastebasket, and fell fast asleep on a couch. The telephone woke her. An hour had passed.

  “Hello, Pam?” Tudsbury sounded excited and gay. “Throw together a bag for me. I’ll be travelling for about a week.”

  “Travelling? Where to?”

  “Can’t talk now.”

  “Shall I also pack?”

  “No.”

  He soon arrived, his suit dark-patched with sweat at the armpits. “Where’s the bag?”

  “On your bed, all ready.”

  “Let me have a stiff gin and bitters. The fat’s in the fire, Pamela. My destination’s Australia.”

  “Australia!”

  “I am in very, very hot water, my dear.” He threw off his jacket, opened his tie, and fell into an armchair with a creak. “It’s worse than Berlin. By God, that script raked raw nerves! The governor and Brooke-Popham were fairly jigging with rage. I got the unruly native treatment, Pam. These two lords of creation actually tried to bully me. Bloody fools, they’re the ones who are in trouble. But they’re determined to throttle anybody who wants to shake them out of their dream world. It was an hour of revelation, Pam, bitter and ominous revelation. What I saw was dry rot, pervasive and terrible, at the very top. Ah
, thank you.” He gulped the drink.

  “What am I to do? Follow you?”

  “No. Brooke-Popham’s about to be relieved. Find out what you can. Keep notes. I’ll hurry back and cover this battle, but that script must go on the air.”

  “Talky, there’s censorship in Australia.”

  “Nothing like this. It can’t be. The unreality, the unreality! The self-contradiction! Do you know, they first said they had the fixed defense lines. Then no, they admitted they hadn’t, because the labor wasn’t available! As for Shairpe’s native labor pool idea, they called it ignorant poppycock. Malaya’s mission is to earn dollars. Every native taken from the gum trees or the tin mines hurts the war effort — this, mind you, with mines and plantations falling day by day to the Japs! Also, the government can’t compete with the pay scale of the planters and mine companies. To commandeer the labor at government rates would take three months of correspondence with the War Office. That’s how their minds are working, Pamela, with Penang gone and the Japs roaring south.”

  “Singapore will fall,” Pam said, wildly wondering how she could get out of this place.

  “Not if Shairpe’s view prevails. I’ve lent myself to this government’s suicidal sham. Now I must make amends. Thank God Phil brought Shairpe here — hullo, here we go!” He sprang at the ringing telephone. “Yes? Yes? — Ah, beautiful! Superb. Thank you — Pam, they did it! They bumped a poor American merchant off the flying boat. I’m on my way.”

  “You’ll be in Australia for Christmas, then. And I’ll be here.”

  “Pam, what’s to be done? It’s the war. This should be a historic broadcast. The BBC can sack me afterward. I don’t really care. Once the deed’s done, and the dust settles, I’ll come back, or you’ll fly to Australia.” Tuds-bury babbled all this as he combed his hair, straightened his tie, and ran to get his bag. “Sorry to bolt like this. It’s only for a few days.”