Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

“Bit ropey,” Leigh repeated, smacking his lips. “We’ll sort it out, though if you ask me, your towkay ’s missing a few beads from his abacus.”

“He’ll drive you out of your gourd,” I said.

“Funny little thing, isn’t he? I can’t understand a word he says.”

“What about your towkay —in Hong Kong?” I asked.

“Him!” Leigh gathered his features solemnly together and said, “In actual fact… he’s a cunt.”

Yardley heard and smiled, and I wondered for a moment whether the obscenity would redeem Leigh. It didn’t. Yardley continued to talk to the fellers on my right, and sometimes to me; Leigh spoke only to me. I was, awkwardly, in the middle, a zone of good humor. There was no way out of it; to skip off with Leigh would mean the end of my drinking at the Bandung; the desertion would prohibit my return. Soon Yardley was saying less and less to me, and Leigh growing quite talkative on his third drink.

“—God, sometimes I hate it,” Leigh said. “One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City. The call of the East indeed — your friend over there was right. That fantastic hoicking puts me off my food, it really does. Still, it won’t be much longer.”

“How long do you plan to stay in Hong Kong?”

“My dear fellow,” said Leigh, “not a moment longer than is absolutely necessary.”

In different words, for fourteen years I’d said the same thing to myself; it was an ambiguous promise, and when I said it, it sounded like never. But Leigh’s sounded like soon.

“Margaret — my wife — Margaret’s got a magnificent cottage picked out. In Wiltshire — you know it? Fantastic place. When I go all broody about the Chinese, Margaret looks at me and says, ‘We’re halfway to Elmview’—that’s the name of the cottage. That cheers me up. And then I don’t feel so bad about—”

The name depressed me; it sounded like the name of an old folks’ home, and I imagined an overheated parlor, a radio playing too loud, an elderly inmate snoring in an armchair, another in a frilly apron busying himself with a dustpan and brush, and a young heavy nurse patiently feeding a protesting crone who was wearing a blue plastic bib and batting the spoon away with her hand. Just saying the name lifted Leigh’s spirits; he was still talking about the cottage.

“—thought of doing a little book about my experiences. Call it Hong Kong Jottings and pack it with sampans and chatter from the club, that sort of thing. I see myself at Elmview on a spring morning, in the front room, sun splashing through the window, working on this book. In longhand, of course. Outside I can see masses of bluebells and a green meadow.” He sighed. “An old horse out to pasture.”

“It sounds—” I could not think of another way of saying it—“very agreeable.”

“You know,” he said, “I’ve never set foot in that cottage. I saw it from a motorcar; Margaret pointed it out from the road. It was raining. We had a ploughman’s lunch in the village — beautiful old pub — and went back to London that same afternoon. But it’s as if I’ve been living there my whole life. I can tell you the position of every stick of furniture, every plate, how the sun strikes the carpet. I can see the tea things arranged on the table, and there’s that—” he sniffed—“curious stale smell of cold ashes in the grate.”

Yardley used to say, “Everyone in the tropics has a funkhole,” and Leigh had told me his; his description had taken the curse off the name — the place was happy, a credible refuge. I had my own plans. I had never told a soul; I had kept my imaginings to myself and added little details now and then over the years. Maybe I had had one gin too many, or it might have been my triumphant feeling over that Bishop Bradley business. Whatever it was — it might have been Leigh’s candor magnetizing mine — I drew very close to him and whispered, “It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Everyone imagines a different funkhole. Take mine, for example. You know what I want?”

“Tell me,” said Leigh, sympathetically.

“First, I want a lot of money — people don’t laugh at a feller with dough. Then I want a yacht that you can sleep on and a huge mansion with a fence or a wall around it and maybe a peacock in the garden. I’d like to walk around all day in silk pajamas, and take up golf and give up these stinking cheroots and start smoking real Havana cigars. And that’s not all—”

Leigh gave me an awfully shocked look; it rattled me so badly I stuttered to a halt and finished my drink in a single gulp. He thought I was mocking him. The dream of mine, the little glimpse of fantasy that had widened into the whole possible picture I saw every day I spent on that island, saving my sanity as I obeyed Hing or turned my girls out or sorted pornographic pictures on the kitchen table in my house in Moulmein Green, hopeful and comforting in its detail, making me resourceful — that to him was mockery.

He said, “Are you taking the mickey out of me?”

There was no way I could explain that I was perfectly serious. I saw it all coming to me quickly, like a jackpot I imagined myself winning: “Just a minute,” I would say to the fellers at the bar, and while everyone watched I would put a coin — say my last — into a one-arm bandit, yank the lever and watch the whirr become a row of stars as the machine exploded and roared, disgorging a shower of silver dollars.

An old horse out to pasture , he had said; I had not giggled — at that or the bluebells. I believed it because he did. But my version of Elmview, my own funkhole (deep-sea fishing in a silk robe and a velvet fedora, with a cigar in my teeth) made him mad. And what bothered me most was that I could not tell whether he felt mocked because my imaginings were grander than his or because they sounded absurd and he doubted them. I would not have minded his envy, but his doubt would have made my whole plan seem inaccessible to me by encouraging my own doubt.

His grim expression made me say what I at once regretted: “I guess it sounds pretty crazy.”

He did not hear me. Behind me, Yardley was horsing around, bawling a joke: “ ‘Organ,’ she says. ‘That’s no organ, breh-heh! Looks more like a flute to me!’”

“I take it Singapore’s not a terribly expensive place to live,” said Leigh.

“That’s a laugh,” I said. “It’s probably more expensive than Hong Kong!”

“I’m quite surprised,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. He took a sip of his drink. “Then the salaries here aren’t very, um, realistic.”

“They’re not too bad,” I said. I even laughed a little bit. But I stopped laughing when I saw what he was driving at. “You mean Hing?”

He nodded and gave me the tight rewarded smile of a man who has just tasted something he likes. He said, “You’ve got an amah ’s salary.”

“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” I said. “If you think I bank on—” But I was ashamed, and flustered — and angry because he still wore that smile. He had spent the day in that upstairs cubicle examining my salary. What could I say? That Gunstone had a few hours before thanked me with an envelope of cash? That I was welcome in any club in Singapore, and was snooker champion of one (unbeaten on the table at the Island Club), and knew a sultan who called me Jack and who had introduced me as his friend to Edmund de Rothschild at a party? That once, on Kampong Java Road, where I had my own brothel, I cleared a couple of thousand after pilferage and breakage was settled? That Edwin Shuck of the American embassy had told me that if it had not been for me Singapore would never have been used as a base for the GIs’ “R and R” and Paradise Gardens would not have existed? That I had plans?