Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [330]
But then one day in his second year of captivity, while he was out with a working party on the road, a young Chinese brushed up against him and pressed something into his hand. He looked at it surreptitiously: it was a cigarette packet wrapped in a handkerchief. When he opened it he put his head in his hands: it contained a lump of sugar and two cooked white mice. And he thought: ‘Well, who knows? At least there’s a chance. Perhaps she’ll survive after all, and so will I.’
75
But more years pass and yet more. Let us suppose that Kate Blackett, now a woman with grown-up children of her own, is sitting at her breakfast-table in a quiet street in Bayswater. Kate has a pleasant, kindly, humorous look (as characters tend to have when their author treats them well) and this is an agreeable room she is having breakfast in: on the wall there is a charming painting by Patricia Moynagh of a curled-up cat, and a delightful, serene painting by Mary Newcomb of several people standing on a ferry, and another of a dog peacefully asleep surrounded by red flowers. Through the window, from where she is sitting, there is a glimpse of garden in which a cat is trying to catch butterflies … Or rather, no. Let us suppose that it is winter. Rub out the cat, erase the butterflies and let us move back inside where it is warmer.
Opposite Kate at the table is a man reading The Times for 10 December 1976. Kate can see nothing of this man (her husband, let us hope) but some grey hair on top of his head and two hands holding up the newspaper. Does he wear glasses? It is impossible to say. His face is hidden by the newspaper. The fingers which are holding it are long and slender and he is wearing a green sweater … (we can see part of its sleeve) and that is all there will be of him until he decides to put down the newspaper. Well, not quite all, however, for presently he speaks to Kate with a slight drawl. An Australian perhaps? From his voice he could be English, though, or even an American who has lived a long time in England. Perhaps, then, Kate has married Ehrendorf, that incorrigible Anglophile, who has at last come to his senses and realized which was the most attractive of the Blackett girls.
‘Listen to this, Kate,’ he says. ‘Here’s something that might interest a rubber tycoon’s daughter: “Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day.” From Our Correspondent, Geneva, 9 December. “Millions of workers on rubber, sugar, tea, cotton or coffee plantations are earning less than $1 (62p) a day, according to the International Labour Office.” Let me see, what else does it say? Trade union rights … et cetera … malnutrition … disease .. Yes … “Many migrant workers on rubber or sugar plantations live in conditions of acute overcrowding. Sometimes there are up to 100 workers in one large room.” Daily wage rates … And so on. There.’
Kate looks around the room vaguely but says nothing. Singapore seems very far away to her now, and no longer quite real … a magical place where she spent her childhood. Why, Malaya is no longer even called Malaya. Things that once seemed immutable have turned out to be remarkably vulnerable to change.
Or have they? That man behind the newspaper, if it were Ehrendorf, let us say, and if he happened to remember his arguments of years ago with Matthew about colonialism and tropical agriculture, might he not, as his eye was caught by that headline ‘Plantation work pays less than one dollar a day’, have said to himself that nothing very much had changed, after all, despite that tremendous upheaval in the Far East? That if even after independence in these Third World countries, it is still like that, then something has gone wrong, that some other, perhaps native, élite has merely replaced the British? If it were Ehrendorf might he not have recalled that remark of Adamson’s (passed on to him by Matthew) about King William and the