The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [410]
‘Singapore’s too small to have her carrying on like that,’ grumbled Walter. ‘Of course, it may not mean anything.’ All the same, it was worrying. Why had she done it?
He had gradually come to see that his early fears, lest Joan should insist on marrying someone unsuitable, had been unfounded. She did not readily attach herself to the men who courted her: he need not have worried about the absurd Carlos. Indeed this, he was now beginning to realize, was just the trouble. She had shown herself to be erratic and unpredictable in her dealings with the eligible young men of the Colony of whom there were, in any case, precious few. The truth was that Walter had not been surprised to learn that Joan had thrown champagne into young Ehrendorf’s face (not that he was very much more suitable than Carlos had been, agreeable fellow though he was). In the past three years, while she was shedding the last traces of the schoolgirl he loved and was imperceptibly changing into a young adult, there had been a number of incidents, trivial in themselves but collectively disturbing. One lovelorn young planter she had even invited to step fully-dressed into the swimming pool. He had done so but it had not advanced his cause. Undoubtedly, the marriage of a daughter is something to which a great deal of attention must be given, like it or not.
The band had stopped playing for the moment and his wife had left his side to ask the Rhythmic Rascals if they would mind not emptying the saliva from their musical instruments into the swimming pool. A cloud had passed over the sun and though it grew no cooler a momentary chill seemed to affect the garden-party, an ominous sensation which was, perhaps, only in Walter’s own mind.
6
Walter, elbows planted on the stone balustrade, chin in hand, gazed moodily down over his chattering guests, half musing on the marriage prospects of his daughter, half hypnotized by the chicken-wire reflections of sunlight on the surface of the pool, still gently heaving although the last of the bathing beauties, wrapped in a bathrobe and escorted by Monty, was already retreating in the direction of the changing pavilion. Walter himself seldom swam, never in public; he was inclined to be sensitive about the ridge of hairs, so thick that they almost amounted to bristles, which for some odd reason had decided to grow over his vertebrae in a thin line stretching from his neck to the base of his spine. These bristles had a tendency to rise when he was angry and sometimes, even, in moments of conjugal intimacy. His wife had once confided in him that every night of their honeymoon she had been visited by a dream in which she had been led by a boar into the depths of a forest; there on a carpet of leaves, marooned in loneliness, she had been mounted by the animal in the grunt-filled silence of the trees. Walter, at the time, had merely shrugged his shoulders, but his feelings had been hurt by his wife’s dream. True, he could have enjoyed a swim with his friends if he had consented to wear an old-fashioned swimming costume with neck and sleeves instead of scanty, all-too-revealing shoulder straps. But Walter was sensitive also about his clothing.
A camera clicked. Walter turned away sharply, aware that his photograph had just been taken. He beckoned to a tall, rather anxious-looking man in his fifties who happened to be passing. This man, whose name was Major Brendan Archer, had been introduced to the Blacketts three or four years earlier by the same François Dupigny who had given Walter such valuable advice on how to detach Joan from her unsuitable young man. Major Archer, who though a civilian had kept his rank as a souvenir, Walter supposed, of the Great War, had become friendly with the Blacketts and with old Mr Webb, too. The old gentleman has responded to the Major’s air of rather gloomy integrity, had even paid him the unusual compliment of offering him a partnership in the Mayfair Rubber Company, his plaything, though more likely