Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [19]
‘If you’re interested in Indo-China,’ said Mrs Blackett brightly but firmly to the gentleman from the Legislative Assembly, ‘you must have a word with François Dupigny, who escaped from there only the other day with Général Catroux … and neither of them with a stitch of clothing. You’ll find him by the tennis court.’ With that, leaving the gentleman looking rather baffled, she moved away towards the ‘flame of the forest’.
As she approached, she found Joan and Ehrendorf chatting quite naturally about the band, Sammy and his Rhythmic Rascals, which could be heard playing not far away beside the swimming pool. This band, a daring innovation thought up by her son, Monty, had also caused her some anxiety for she was afraid that it might be thought vulgar. Captain Ehrendorf, the skin around his eyes crinkling into an attractive smile, assured her that it was a great success and that he believed he had even seen General Bond’s highly-polished shoe tapping to the rhythm. One thing was for sure: the General had moved nearer to the pool … but that might be because he had an eye for the bathing beauties who swooped and tumbled like dolphins in the blue-green water beneath the dais set up for the band; it had been Monty’s idea, too, that the physically attractive younger guests should be invited to bathe. Mrs Blackett, aghast, for this was the first intimation she had had that General Bond had left the comparative safety of the Orchid Garden, glanced towards the band whose metal instruments winked with painful brightness in the late afternoon sunlight, to see four Chinese saxophonists in scarlet blazers and white trousers rise as one man from the back row, play a few bars and sink back again. ‘I must find Walter quickly,’ she thought. At the same time she wondered whether she might not have imagined the scene between Joan and Ehrendorf. But a glance at Ehrendorf’s uniform was enough to tell her that she had not: there were still a number of dark spots on the light fabric though they were fading rapidly in the heat.
‘ “A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square,”’ crooned four of the Rhythmic Rascals, their arms on each other’s shoulders and their four heads very close to the microphone. ‘ “I know ’cos I was there …”’
Mrs Blackett noticed with relief that Walter was moving among the guests not far from the pool. ‘Are you sure people won’t find them vulgar?’ she asked distractedly, and again the young people were obliged to reassure her.
‘She did what to Jim Ehrendorf?’ demanded Walter a few minutes later. He had left the pool and taken up a vantage point at the balustrade where the twin flights of stone steps met beneath the portico. From here he had been watching sombrely for some time as General Bond and his staff officers like a small flock of sheep, swagger-sticks under their arms, browsed peacefully on cocktails nearer and nearer to where Air-Marshal Babington and his pack of wolves lay in wait by the tennis courts.
‘I can see I shall have to give that young lady a talking to!’ But Walter’s eye remained on the browsing officers below.
Walter, as it happened, knew a little more than most people in Singapore about the cause of friction between the two commanders. The question that separated them was this. How should Malaya be defended and above all, by whom? Air-Marshal Babington, imbued with the fanatical doctrines of the Air Ministry, considered that only the RAF could handle the task. General Bond believed, on the other hand, as any red-blooded Army man would, that rather than trust to aeroplanes, whose effectiveness was conjectural, the Army should deal with the matter. And now, as ill-luck would have it, both sides of this dispute were represented at