The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [697]
‘Who the devil are you and what d’you want?’ he demanded furiously.
‘I have a motor-cycle,’ said Matthew, taken aback by this hostile reception. ‘I just wondered whether you might like a lift… But I expect you don’t,’ he added as the General’s cheeks grew purple. With an embarrassed cough he sank back again into the darkness. Presently a motor-cycle engine roared not far away and grew fainter. The General was left alone to the rain and the night.
When Matthew reached the Mayfair he learned that Vera, unable to get through to Bukit Timah, had returned to the Mayfair but had almost immediately set off again, nobody knew where.
68
Walter had long since ceased to believe that the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese could be averted. If it had not been possible to stop, or even delay, the Japanese up-country with the help of prepared defences and relatively fresh troops, it was improbable that they would be stopped now at the gates of the city. Curiously, he gave little thought either to escaping or to rejoining his family. After all, they were safe. His wife and Kate were in Australia. Monty was heaven knew where … India perhaps. Joan and Nigel should soon be in Bombay. Joan’s capture of Nigel, certainly, was a cause for satisfaction and boded well for the future of Blackett and Webb. In that respect everything had turned out even better than if she had got Matthew Webb in her grip: once the two companies had merged, any attempt by Matthew to use his stake in the company to influence its policy could be comfortably out-voted.
Yet what a lot had been lost for Blackett and Webb in the past few weeks! It would be a long time (he himself might even be an old man, a grumpy old figurehead to whom the young executives took it in turns to make polite remarks at garden-parties!) before Blackett and Webb was again the commercial force in the Far East that it had been over the past thirty or forty years. All Malaya’s rubber, tin and palm-oil were already in Japanese hands; in Java and Sumatra they probably soon would be. All the agencies … the shipping, the insurance, the import-export and entrepôt, the engineering and banking, were either in suspended animation or had been withdrawn to Australia or Britain, their management and staff scattered to the winds. Something on that scale is not built up again overnight! In so far as these enterprises had a physical presence (godowns, goods and produce in stock, engineering plant, vehicles and so forth) it was being demolished with equal enthusiasm by Japanese bombers and British demolition teams. Perhaps it was this single-minded approach to the demolition of everything that had gone to make up the presence of Blackett and Webb in Singapore, amounting almost to collusion, it seemed to Walter, that he found so disorienting.
His family had left Singapore. He no longer had any responsibilities, except to the people who worked for him … but even his duty to them had grown nebulous under the bombs. In any case, he could no longer exert any real influence to help them. He passed these few days, therefore, roaming the city aimlessly and alone, almost as he had done in his youth when he had lived in a mess run by one of the big merchant houses, with a lot of other young lads. So Walter drifted about the city like a shadow or brooded alone in the store-keeper’s office in the godown on the river which he had made his temporary home. Once or twice, rather than walk or use a car, he hailed a sampan from where they clustered several deep with the tongkangs at the Blackett quay and had himself conveyed downriver to the Club. But the Club itself was unrecognizable, crammed with refugees, sick and wounded, and he left again immediately without speaking to anyone.