The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [526]
Dupigny, exiled among the British, uttered a sigh and longed to go home, too.
30
HOUSEHOLDERS: No lights showing seaward or upward. Remove bulbs so that your servants cannot put on a light you have considered unnecessary.
MOTORISTS: Headlights and sidelights have got to be darkened. It is the beam that is the danger. A sheet of brown paper entirely covering the whole headlight glass with a double thickness on the top half kills the beam and upward glare but gives a reasonable light on an unlit road. Wind down window before leaving car to prevent glass fragments in a blast.
Now darkness had fallen on Singapore, this first evening of the war in the Far East. While it was still daylight the coming of war had remained difficult to grasp, at least for those who had not been living or working near where the bombs had fallen. Even those who, like Walter, had looked at the roped-off bomb damage in Raffles Place and Battery Road had found it hard to see the rubble as being in any way different from some civilian catastrophe, the exploding of a gas main, say, or one of Chinatown’s periodic tenement conflagrations. But this evening when it grew dark, it grew very dark indeed. The dimming of street lights, the motor-cars creeping along with masked headlights, the blacked-out shops and bungalows and tenements and street stalls (not perfectly blacked-out, admittedly, because in that sweltering climate windows must be kept open, but still a shocking extinction of light and life) … all this came as an unpleasant surprise to the city’s population, reminding them that History had once more switched its points; this time most abruptly, to send them careering along a track which curved away into a frightening darkness, beyond which lay their destination.
But if the first evening of the war was bad, the second was even worse. The first had been a novelty, at least. People were excited by the prospect of another air-raid. They thought of the Blitz and felt that they were participating at last, that unusual demands were being made on them. But when it grew dark again on the second evening it gradually became clear that this new way of life was not a passing fancy: it had come to stay for as long as it liked and when it would end nobody could say. Walter, who had arrived at Government House in daylight and normality for a conference with the Governor’s staff and the Colonial Secretary on the subject of new freight priorities to take effect on the other side of the Causeway, experienced the darkness as a physical shock when his Bentley crept away down the drive once more and out into the shrouded city. Moreover, he was disturbed by what he had just heard for, just as he was on the point of leaving, the Governor, who had not himself taken part in the conference, had asked to see him for a moment.
Walter was no longer as frequent a visitor to Government House as he once had been. In his younger days he had been on more friendly terms with the Governor of the time than he now was with Sir Shenton and Lady Thomas. It was not that he found Sir Shenton Thomas more formal than his predecessors: if anything, it was the reverse. Walter had felt more at ease when the man was masked by the dignity and ceremony of the office. Walter and his wife had often been invited to formal dinners at Government House in days gone by. It had not seemed to him in the least unsuitable that the guests on such occasions should be assembled in a respectful herd while waiting for the Governor and his wife to make an entrance; nor that, when the entrance was made and an aide announced ‘His Excellency the Officer