Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [17]
5
Late in September 1940 at a garden-party given by the Blacketts for a large number of the most influential people in the Straits a further incident occurred to disturb their tranquil lives. Joan unexpectedly threw a glass of champagne in the face of one of the guests. The victim was a young officer from the American military attaché’s office, Captain James Ehrendorf. Fortunately, though, he was more or less a friend of the family and showed no sign of wanting to make a fuss.
The success, of this garden-party (for which, incidentally, old Mr Webb’s birthday had been chosen) was important to both Walter Blackett and his wife. For Walter its importance lay in the fact that it was the forerunner of a series of social occasions planned to celebrate his firm’s jubilee in the coming year. Webb and Company had been founded in Rangoon in 1891 and its first office in Singapore had been opened shortly afterwards. It was hoped that twelve months of rejoicing, symbolized by an occasional garden-party, firework display or exhibition of Blackett and Webb services and produce, would culminate at the New Year of 1942 in one of those monster carnival parades so beloved of the Chinese in Singapore. The outbreak of the war in Europe had for a time thrown these festivities into question, but the Government, it transpired, was anxious for propaganda purposes that they should continue in order to combat the ceaseless anti-British ravings from Tokyo. It was felt that nothing could better demostrate the benefits of British rule than to recall fifty years of one of Singapore’s great merchant houses and the vast increase of wealth which it had helped to generate in the community for the benefit of all. As for Sylvia Blackett, this garden-party was taking place in the absence of her only serious rivals in the Crown Colony’s society (the Governor and Lady Thomas had departed for eight months’ leave in Europe) and she believed that provided all went well nothing more was required to consolidate her already well-established social position.
The Blacketts lived in a magnificent old colonial house of a kind rare in Singapore, built of brick and dating back seventy years or more. The ranks of fat white pillars that supported its upper balconies combined with the floods of staircases that spilled out on either side of its portico like cream from the lip of a jug to give the building a classical, almost judicial appearance, and yet, at the same time, an air of ease, comfort, even sensuality. This impression was heightened by the lush and colourful gardens down into which the staircases flowed. Here fountains played on neatly mown aquamarine lawns flanked by brilliant ‘flame of the forest’ trees. Behind one accurately-trimmed hedge were the tennis courts, behind another the path that led to the Orchid House; in the middle of the largest expanse of lawn was the swimming pool whose blue-green water, casting jagged sparks of reflected sunlight at the white shuttered windows of the bedrooms above, seemed merely to be the lawn itself turned liquid. Beyond the pool a shady corridor of pili nut trees with white flowers or purple-black fruit depending on maturity led to an even more colourful wilderness of rare shrubs. Whoever had planted this part of the garden had tried to escape from the real, somewhat brooding vegetation of the tropics in order to create an atmosphere of colour and brilliance, the tropics of a child’s imagination. Here pink crêpe myrtle and African mallow crowded beside the white narcissus flowers of kopsia and the astonishing scarlet of the Indian coral tree and behind them a silent orchestra of colours: cassia, rambutan, horse-radish, ‘rose of the mountain’ and mauve and white-flowered potato trees until