The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [586]
‘You must halt …’ said Vera with a sigh. ‘I must go on because my silk-worms are hungry.’
‘What? You have silk-worms?’ cried Matthew, thinking: ‘How delightfully Chinese!’
‘Oh no, here in Singapore it is too hot for silk-worms.’ She smiled flirtatiously. ‘It is a line from an old Chinese song about a woman who is separated from her lover.’
‘Well, let me see …’ Matthew again looked at his watch. ‘Can I invite you to a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you, but first I must visit a friend who is dying. Will you come with me?’
Presently, Matthew found himself standing in a vast dimly lit shed, blinking and polishing his spectacles; but even when he had put them on again, such was the contrast with the brightness outside, he still could not see very well. Vera had set off down a sort of aisle on each side of which rose tier after tier of shadowy racks, as in a store-house or wine-cellar. Matthew followed her, stepping uncertainly. There was a smell of humanity here and a faint, twittering murmur of voices.
As his vision improved he saw that the racks on either side were occupied by recumbent forms, some of which stirred slightly as he passed but for the most part lying still … Eyes followed him incuriously, the sunken eyes of very elderly, emaciated people; here and there he made out a somewhat younger face. Vera explained to him that this was a Chinese ‘dying-house’ where lonely people came to die. He had not wanted to come; he had tried to explain to Vera that he had only just finished watching a funeral. It seemed to him that his life had taken a decidely lugubrious turn all of a sudden. No, he would definitely prefer to wait for her outside.
But as they were walking Vera had told him a little about the old man she was going to visit. He had befriended her on the boat that had taken her from Shanghai to Singapore (that same boat on which Miss Blackett and her mother had been travelling), had given her a little money and had helped her to find her feet; his own children had died or disappeared in one of the civil wars that had swept back and forth over China since the fall of the Manchu dynasty. While talking about this man, to whom she was bringing a little parcel of food, Vera happened to mention that until he had grown too old to work he had lived by tapping his few rubber trees on a smallholding near Layang Layang in Johore. Matthew had pricked up his ears at this and exclaimed: ‘That’s near my own estate!’ And so, despite his misgivings, he had decided to enter the dying-house with her. Now, blundering between these racks of moribund people in the gloom, he felt like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
It was not only the lonely who came to die here, explained Vera in a low voice, grasping him by the sleeve, but a great many others, too. People were brought here to die by their families in order to spare the home from the bad luck that comes when somebody dies there …
‘I must say, that sounds a bit heartless!’
Yes, and yet it was accepted by the person who was dying as the best thing to do and the custom had been carried on, perhaps, for generations. And no doubt those who came here from the land of the living to bring food and water to their dying relations would in due course come to spend their own last days or hours here, rather than take up room in one of the crowded tenement cubicles or boats on the river … It was very sad, certainly, but it was moving, too, to see the way these shelves of dying people accepted their fate. Vera’s dark eyes searched Matthew’s face to see whether he understood. He nodded cautiously though, as a matter of fact, he was not very keen on hearing of people ‘accepting their fate’. Vera seemed to him extraordinarily full of life by contrast with the trays of shadowy expiring figures on either side. ‘What a dismal way to end up though!’
‘How attractive he is!’ Vera was thinking. ‘How stooping and shortsighted!