The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [555]
They crept forward again, then stopped. A man ran back along the train blowing a whistle and shouting ‘Air-raid!’ his feet crunching noisily on the cinders as he passed. One of the officers switched off the blue light and the others groped for their helmets. Nothing happened; they sat in silence, waiting. The night sounds of the jungle rose in volume around them, eerie and frightening. Something, perhaps a moth, brushed against Ehrendorf’s face in the darkness and he flailed at it in sudden horror. Still nothing happened. Feeling drowsy he leaned his head against the side of the coach, his helmet tilted to form a comfortable support. After a wait that seemed interminable the train began cautiously to advance once more.
Ehrendorf slept now, shaken this way and that by the motion of the train. A smell of tobacco, remembered from his childhood, flirted with his scarcely conscious mind, a smell not of burning tobacco but of the empty cigarette tins his father used to give him. In his dream he thought: ‘How close we are to things when we smell them!’ Then his restless mind meandered away in a long, meaningless series of half-thoughts about Joan. He saw her walking ahead of him in a blue cotton dress, flaring and fading rhythmically in time with the motion of the train. ‘It would never have worked in any case. We had nothing in common.’
The train had stopped, evidently in some small station, perhaps Segamat or Gemas. There were no lights on the platform so it was impossible to make out. There was a storm grumbling nearby: lightning flickered over the surrounding tree tops. He wondered what time it was. A flash of lightning illuminated the compartment for an instant and he saw his travelling companions; they were still silent but no longer sitting erect: now they slumped as if mysteriously gassed. Another train travelling in the opposite direction had stopped beside their own. One of them began to move: at first he thought it was the one he was in but it proved to be the other: a brief, sickening impression of immobility took hold of him as he realized. One darkened compartment after another slipped past. And then, surprisingly, a compartment which by comparison with the rest seemed brightly lit. Ehrendorf, still drugged with sleep, glimpsed a little cluster of illuminated brigadiers poring over a map which they had spread on a table between them. He sat up quickly, but the other train had already vanished into the darkness.
‘Wasn’t that General Heath in the middle?’ he asked the man opposite him, but there was no reply. Heath was in command of 111 Corps. After all, he mused, things might not be going too badly if Heath was paying a visit to Singapore.
36
Dupigny had spent the past two days very pleasantly in George Town, the only town of consequence on the island of Penang. He had come here partly because he felt he needed a change from Singapore, partly in the hope of borrowing some money from a French acquaintance. Although, as it had transpired, he had not succeeded in borrowing the money, in all other respects his visit to Penang had turned out well. He had managed, despite his threadbare clothing, to persuade the management of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel that Monsieur Ballereau, the French Consul in Singapore whom Dupigny considered, for no particular reason, his sworn enemy, would redeem all his bills and chits … a decidedly satisfactory state of affairs, given the excellence of the hotel’s cuisine. Now the problem which was exercising him as he strolled along the esplanade giving himself an appetite for a substantial lunch in prospect, was this: would his residence at the E and O be a sufficient sign of affluence for him to buy new clothes at a superior outfitter’s on credit? In normal times a European would have expected to be given credit in any case without difficulty, merely signing a chit to be redeemed in due course. But of late things had been growing more difficult.