Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'Is anything wrong?'

He shook his head, but he looked stricken.

'It's this food,' I said. 'You shouldn't be eating such strong—'

'No,' he said. 'It's those pictures.'

On the white-washed wall of the kedai was a series of framed photographs, old hand-coloured ones, lozenge-shaped, like huge lockets. Two women and some children. Not so unusual; the Chinese always have photographs of relations around — a casual reverence. One could hardly call them a pious people; their brand of religion is ancestor worship, the simple display of the family album. But I had not realized until then that Woo Boh Swee's relations had had money. The evidence was in the pictures: both women were smiling, showing large sets of gold dentures.

'That's them,' said Ladysmith.

'Who?' I said. Staring at them I noticed certain wrinkles of familiarity, but the Chinese are very hard to tell apart. The cliché is annoyingly true.

Ladysmith put his chopsticks down and began to whisper: 'The women in my room — that's them. That one had blood on her hair, and the other one—'

'Dengue fever,' I said. 'You said they didn't have any teeth. Now I ask you — look at those teeth. You've got the wrong ladies, my boy.'

'No!'

His pallor had returned, and the face I saw across the table was the one I had seen on that pillow. I felt sorry for him, as helpless as I had before.

Woo Boh Swee, the owner of City Bar, went by the table. He was brisk, snapping a towel. 'Okay? Anything? More beer? What you want?'

'We're fine, Mr Woo,' I said. 'But I wonder if you can tell us something. We were wondering who those women are in the pictures — over there.'

He looked at the wall, grunted, lowered his head and simply walked away, muttering.

'I don't get it,' I said. I left the table and went to the back of the bar, where Boh Swee's son Reggie — the 'English' son — was playing mah-jongg. I asked Reggie the same question: who are they?

'I'm glad you asked me,' said Reggie. 'Don't mention them to my father. One's his auntie, the other one's his sister. It's a sad story. They were cut up during the war by the dwarf bandits. That's what my old man calls them in Hokkien. The Japanese. It happened over at the headquarters — what they used for headquarters when they occupied the town. My old man was in Singapore.'

'But the Japanese were only here for a few months,' I said.

'Bunch of thieves,' said Reggie. 'They took anything they could lay their hands on. They used those old ladies for house-girls, at the headquarters, that big house, where the tree is. Then they killed them, just like that, and hid the bodies — we never found the graves. But that was before they captured Singapore. The British couldn't stop them, you know. The dwarf bandits were clever — they pretended they were Chinese and rode all the way to the Causeway on bicycles.'

I looked back at the table. Ladysmith was staring, his eyes again bright with fever; staring at those gold teeth.

We had a drama society, but it was not called the South Malaysia Pineapple Growers' Drama Society; it was the Footlighters, it met on Wednesday evenings in the Club lounge, and the Official Patron was the Sultan. He seldom came to the plays and never to the club. It was just as well, the Footlighters said; when the Sultan was at the theatre you couldn't drink at the bar between the acts, which was why most of the audience came, the men anyway. Angela Miller, who drove down from Layang Layang every Wednesday, said the Sultan was a frightful old bore whose single interest was polo.

An effortlessly deep-voiced woman, much more handsome at forty-five than she had been pretty at twenty, Angela had played a Wilde heroine six years before — that was in Kota Bharu — and found the role so agreeable, so suited to her temper, that in moments of stress she became that heroine; telling a story, she used the heroine's inflections and certain facial expressions, especially incredulity. Often, it allowed her to manage her anger.

It was Angela who told the story of Jan's first visit to the club. Jan had looked at the photographs on the wall of the bar and then sat in a lounge chair sipping her gimlet while the other members talked. Only Angela had seen Jan rush to the window and exclaim, 'What a lovely time of day! '

'All I could see were the tennis courts,' said Angela later, 'but little Jan said, "Look at the air — it's like silk." '

Jan Presser was new, not only to the Club and the Foot-lighters, but to Ayer Hitam, where her husband Rupert had just been posted to cut down a rubber estate and oversee the planting of oil palms.

'Anyone,' said Angela, 'who spends that long looking out of the window has to be new to Ayer Hitam. I look out of the window and don't see a blessed thing! '

It had happened only the previous week. Already it was one of Angela's stories; she had a story to explain the behaviour of every Footlighter and, it was said, most planter families. That exclamation at sundown was all the Footlighters knew of Jan on the evening they met to pick a new play. She was a pale girl, perhaps twenty-six, with a small head and a very young baby. Some of the male Foot-lighters had spoken to Jan's husband; they had found him hearty, with possibilities backstage, but mainly interested in fishing.

Angela was chairing the meeting; they had narrowed the selection to Private Lives and The World of Suzie Wong, and before anyone asked her opinion, Jan said, 'We

'Oh, really?' said Angela in her intimidating bass after a pause. She trilled the r as she would have done on stage, and she glared at Jan.

'Yes, urn,' said Jan, 'I played Amanda. Rupert helped with the sets.' She smiled and closed her eyes, remembering. 'What a night that was. It rained absolute buckets.'

'Maybe we should put it on here,' said Duff Gillespie. 'We need some rain over at my place.'

Everyone laughed, Angela loudest of all, and Jan said, 'It's a very witty play. Two excellent women's parts and lots of good lines.'

'Epicene,' said Tony Evans.

'I've noticed,' said Henry Eliot, a white-haired man who usually played fathers, 'that when you use a big word, Tony, you never put it in a sentence. It's rather cowardly.'

'That's who we're talking about,' said Tony, affecting rather than speaking in the Welsh accent that was natural to him. 'Noël Coward.'

'Too-bloody-shay,' said Duff, 'pardon my French.'

Jan looked from face to face; she wondered if they were making fun of her.

'That settles it/ said Angela. 'Suzie Wong it is.'

'When did we decide that?' asked Henry, making a face.

'You didn't,' said Angela, 7 did. We can't have squabbling.' She smiled at Jan. 'You'll find me fantastically dictatorial, my dear. Pass me that script, would you, darling?' Angela took the grey booklet that Tony Evans had been flipping through. She put it on the table, opened it decisively to Cast, in Order of Their Appearance, and ran the heel of her hand down the fold, flattening it. She said, 'Now for the cast.'

At eleven-thirty, all the main parts had been allotted. 'Except one,' said Jan.

'I beg your pardon,' said Angela.

'I mean, it's all set, isn't it? Except that we haven't—' She looked at the others '—we haven't decided the biggest part, have we?'

Angela gave Jan her look of incredulity. She did it with wintry slowness, and it made Jan pause and know she had said something wrong. So Jan laughed, it was a nervous laugh, and she said, 'I mean, who's Suzie?'

'Who indeed?' said Henry in an Irish brogue. He took his pipe out of his mouth to chuckle; then he returned the pipe and the chuckling stopped. He derived an unusual joy from watching two women disagree. His smile was like triumph.