Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [318]
‘Gosh! How can a girl do that to her career?’ asked one of the other girls.
‘I must go and find Vera,’ whispered Matthew to the Major. But the Major was still asleep. Matthew did not wake him but made his way stiffly out to the foyer. He stood there for a few moments gazing out in bewilderment as the last glittering staircase faded from his mind and was replaced by half a dozen motor-cars blazing fiercely in a car park a hundred yards away.
Although Matthew had no clear idea where he should look for Vera, it seemed to him quite likely that he would find her sooner or later. After all, the space in which they could avoid each other was shrinking rapidly; they were like two fish caught in a huge net: as the net was drawn in they were inevitably brought closer together. The difficulty was that a million or more other people had been caught in the same net and now here they all were together, like herrings in a flashing bundle dumped on the quayside … it was difficult to see one herring for all the others. Finding himself across the road from Raffles Hotel he went inside and telephoned the Mayfair. But Vera still had not returned and there had been no word of her.
In the past few hours a movement of refugees had developed from west to east across the city as the Japanese pressed in towards the outskirts of Tanglin and from Pasir Panjang towards the brickworks, Alexandra Barracks and the biscuit factory. As the fighting drew nearer, the Asiatic quarters emptied and people fled towards the Changi and Serangoon Roads with what few belongings they could carry, rushing together in a dying wave that would presently wash back again with diminished force the way it had come.
Matthew allowed himself to be carried along by the tide of refugees flowing from the direction of the padang and the cathedral. His watch had stopped and he had no idea what time it might be … It had grown dark while he had been in the cinema and it was no longer possible to make out clearly the features of the people he saw in the street … strained, blank, Oriental faces, men and women with swaying poles bouncing with the rhythm of their steps. Matthew felt sorry for them. What business was it of theirs, this war conceived hundreds of miles away and incubated in Geneva!
He plodded along mechanically, so tired that time passed in a dream. The palms of his hands continued to throb, but at a distance, as if they scarcely belonged to him any more. Presently he reached a place where the macadam road-surface, melted by the heat of the day, had been set on fire by an incendiary bomb and was burning bright orange. He hurried past it, aware that it must create a dangerous pool of light to attract the planes which still lurked in the black sky above. There was evidence of looting, too: he found himself trudging through sand-dunes which lay across his path and turned out to be sugar from a nearby store. He saw men and boys crawling in and out of shattered shop windows and a shadowy figure with a rickshaw full of bottles offered to sell him a bottle of brandy for a dollar. Half a mile further on he stumbled into a twenty-five-pounder field-gun halted in a prodigious traffic jam at a fork in the road: there were other guns, too, a little further on, and a great deal of cursing could be heard. A young officer sat on the wheel of one of the twenty-five-pounders.
‘You don’t happen to know where we are, do you?’ he asked Matthew. ‘We spent the afternoon over there firing on a map reference given us by the Sherwood Foresters, but the