The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [684]
‘What?’ demanded Walter. ‘Are you talking to me?’ But the voice had faded once more into the ghostly plucking of a harp. And anyway, it must have been someone else called Walter.
On the other hand, Walter realized suddenly, there was probably no need to worry about the rubber, at least for the moment. For there was so much of it, several thousand tons. Unless they had some mad idea of burning down the buildings as well, which was surely not the case, the PWD busybodies would need several weeks merely to shift the rubber from the godowns to a suitable site for burning. The same was probably true of other commodities which Blackett and Webb held in their godowns. It was evident that what was most at risk was the investment in engineering and motor-assembly plants. It was that which would need protection. It was that which the PWD men would go for first.
But oddly enough, as it turned out, they did not. They went for Walter’s liquor godown at the docks. A telephone message chased him round the city, warning him. He could no longer bear to sit in the improvised offices in Tanglin surrounded by a staff which had by now shrunk, thanks to the demands of the passive defence services, to an efficient young Cantonese, a couple of elderly Englishmen who but for the war would long since have been put out to grass, and two or three Eurasian typists. So, despite the danger, Walter had himself driven about the city inspecting the various Blackett and Webb premises and offering a word of encouragement to whatever staff remained (for here, too, the number of his employees was shrinking daily, almost hourly). Mohammed, his syce, did not seem to mind: he, too, seemed anxious to pursue his normal life.
Although he seldom stayed for more than a few minutes at each place he visited, it now took so long to cross the ruined city that the better part of Walter’s day was spent in the car, an ancient Alvis which Mohammed had found somewhere. Monty had evidently succeeded in getting both himself and the Bentley away on the Félix Roussel. Apart from faint surprise that the boy should have had sufficient initiative, Walter had no strong feelings about his son’s desertion. On the whole he was better out of the way. Once or twice, though, staring out with sightless eyes at the boiling streets, the thought of Harvey Firestone’s five efficient sons made him clench his fists and caused the bristles to stir on his spine. How promising life had once appeared, how disastrously it had turned out!
Even the city now was hardly recognizable any longer as the place where he had spent such a great part of his life. The roads were clogged with military vehicles, there were gun emplacements every few yards, each crossroads seemed to have its own traffic jam which sweating military policemen were trying to free. And everywhere he looked he saw bomb-craters and rubble, shattered trees, uprooted lamp-posts, tangled tramway cables, and smoke from the buildings burning on every side. With the smoke there came, barely noticeable at first, a disagreeable smell. Old Singapore hands like Walter were used to unpleasant smells: they came from everywhere … from the drains and from the river above all, but also from less likely places, from Tanglin rose-gardens for instance, where the ‘boys’ sometimes failed to bury properly the household excrement, or someone’s spaniel dug it up again. In Singapore you could never be quite safe: even while you stood smiling fixedly under the great candelabra in the ballroom at Government House, once a gift from the Emperor Franz Josef to the third Duke of Buckingham, you might suddenly get a distinct whiff of something disagreeable. But this was different. This was altogether more sickening. It seemed to cling to your hair and clothes. When you took out your handkerchief to blow your nose it was there, too. Presently, it became stronger and not even the swirling smoke could disguise the fact that it came from the bodies stretched in rows on the pavements which no one had yet had time to bury.
Tired of the