The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [623]
The Langfields on the whole looked subdued, which Walter found reasonably gratifying. Nor was this simply because their family was about to be sundered. The Langfields had suffered a misfortune. A bomb jettisoned at random by a Japanese plane had fallen in Nassim Road, partly destroying their house. None of them had been hurt, fortunately, except for a few scratches. Since the damage had only been to property Walter had felt himself permitted at first to treat the matter as a joke. At the Club, chuckling, he had entertained his friends with what he claimed was an eye-witness description of ‘the bomb on the bear-garden’. The rats and cockroaches that had poured out of the smoking ruins had been nobody’s business! And poor oldSolomon wandering about howling with grief. Why? Because he kept his money under his mattress, as everyone knew, and it had been blown up with the rest of the bear-garden! After a while, however, Walter fell silent, having realized that some of his audience were not relishing his joke at Langfield’s expense quite as much as he did himself. But Walter was fundamentally a kind-hearted man and he could see that, after all, having your house destroyed could have its unpleasant side. And so he had generously made amends by inviting the Langfields to stay at his house until they had managed to re-establish themselves in their own; besides, since the women-folk were going off together it made sense for the two families to be under the same roof for a while. Walter was considered at the Singapore Club to have emerged, after a shaky start, very creditably from the Langfields’ misfortune, given the legendary antipathy between the two families.
Solomon, as it happened, was not looking particularly well. He was getting on in years and had reached the age when a person finds it hard to adjust to a sudden shock like the destruction of his house. Mrs Langfield had confided in Mrs Blackett (the two ladies, having swallowed the distaste of years in a few minutes, had discovered that they had everything in common and had quite as much gossip backed up over the years as Walter had rubber in his warehouses) that it had taken some time for the poor old fellow to be coaxed out of the ruins. He had wanted to stay on there, it appeared! With ceilings which might collapse at any moment! And when he had been told of the invitation to the Blacketts’ he had grown more stubborn than ever. In the end Nigel had had to accept the invitation on his behalf and Dr Brownley had had to make a personal visit to the shattered house in Nassim Road to dislodge the old boy.
Dr Brownley, seated opposite old Solomon, might well have been thinking that the old man’s face had an unhealthy cast, yellowish with brightly flushed patches. But as a matter of fact he was concentrating more on his supper which was exceptionally appetizing. Walter, drumming absently on the table with a crust of ‘health bread’, for to the indignation of Tanglin the Cold Storage had stopped baking white bread on Government orders, surveyed the table and reflected that tomorrow, when the women had sailed for Australia, he would at last have time to get down to some serious work. He would miss them, no doubt, but that could not be helped. Besides, there was always Joan.
At the end of the table Matthew had become involved in a heated discussion with Nigel, odd snatches of which reached Walter’s distracted ears … something about colonial policy during the Depression. Matthew, Walter had to admit, had turned out a disappointment. He had grown somewhat thinner during his weeks in Singapore but no less excitable and opinionated. Why, the other day he had even asserted that the European estates had swindled inarticulate native smallholders out of their share of Malaya’s rubber exports under the Restriction Scheme. And how, Walter had enquired with an ironical smile, did we manage to do that? How did we manage to do that when assessment was under Government