The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [620]
‘By the way, Blackett,’ old Solomon Langfield was unable to resist saying with ill-concealed malice as they prepared to go their separate ways, ‘it’s bad luck about your jubilee. I suppose you’ll have to call it off under the present circumstances.’
‘Not at all,’ replied Walter coldly. ‘We’ve been asked to go ahead with it for the sake of civilian morale. I hope you don’t mean to call yours off?’
‘We aren’t due to have ours for another couple of years,’ Solomon Langfield, out-manoeuvred and cursing inwardly, was forced to admit.
‘Oh? I didn’t realize that we had been established longer than you and Bowser,’ said Walter condescendingly.
‘By that time, at any rate,’ replied Solomon, trying to recover the ground he had lost, ‘we should be at peace again and able to do things properly.’
‘By that time,’ retorted Walter, delivering the coup de grâce, ‘another war will probably have broken out or heaven knows what will have happened.’
When Walter mentioned evacuation to Australia in the company of the Langfield women to his own family, however, his proposal was received with indignation and dismay. To travel with Langfields was bad enough, but to be expected to live cheek by jowl with them in Australia was more than flesh and blood could endure. Joan flatly refused to consider leaving with anybody, let alone a Langfield. There was a war on and plenty for an able-bodied young woman to do in Singapore! As for Kate, she was alarmed at the prospect of having as a constant companion Melanie, whom she considered capable of any outrage or excess. For there were times, particularly when there was some authority to be flouted, when Melanie’s behaviour verged on the insane, so it seemed to Kate. Now, while she listened to her parents arguing, she remembered an occasion at school when the girls in her dormitory had planned a midnight feast. It had been agreed that each of them would contribute something to eat or drink, a couple of biscuits saved from tea-time, say, or a bottle of lemonade crystals. She remembered how they had all crouched, shivering and breathless with excitement, on the waxed floor between two beds, each producing what she had managed to collect … until last of all, Melanie, with an air of triumph had slapped something down on the floor with a dull thud. An enormous dead chicken! She had somehow broken into the caretaker’s chicken coop, strangled a chicken, plucked it and here it was! Well, it seemed to Kate that someone who instead of a bar of chocolate or a couple of Marie biscuits brought a raw chicken to a midnight feast could hardly be called sane. What would she get up to in Australia with only her mother to restrain her?
Monty, on the other hand, brightened up when he heard that there was a prospect of either Nigel Langfield or himself accompanying the women-folk to safety. He believed he could count on Nigel to show the necessary courage and foolishness to insist on sticking it out at his post. Things had not been going well recently for Monty but now they might be looking better. In the meantime he was having to fight a determined rear-guard action with medical certificates from Dr Brownley to prevent himself being enlisted in the Local Defence Corps. The air-raids, too, increasingly alarmed him. Well, if there was a chance of escorting women to safety only an idiot would linger in Singapore to be bombed. He would crack off to Australia and take charge of the firm’s office there … as an ‘essential occupation’ that should keep him out of the beastly Army, with luck.
But after a day