A Woman of Bangkok (39 page)

‘And then the manager sacked you?’

‘Yes, ’cause nex’ night Black Leopard cannot work, ’cause then she Black-eye Leopard.’ She laughed, but was immediately serious again. ‘You not know how bad that girl to me, darling. Many time she try to kill me. Giff cowboy maybe five hunderd tic. But he not kill. He come to me, say, “Black Leopard giff me money to kill you. But why I do that? I like you good more batter than she.” Her hussband cowboy too. Very ritss—oh, so ritss I cannot say. She try to make him kill me too. But he like me very mutss. Want to slip. I ask him, “How I can slip wiss you? You want to make trouble more for me” I not like him. Will not slip.

‘Sometime I wiss you cowboy, darling. Then you kill Black Leopard, ’cause you luff me …’

That day we gorged at a shop overlooking the river. She liked both the food and the setting. ‘I sink you no good for me, Wretch. Come Chiengmai, I eat and slip too mutss. Get fat. Get black. When I go back Bangkok, I sink man not want to dance wiss me any more. He say, “Vilai, you too fat, too black. Go ’way, honey. Now there
two
Black Leopard in Bangkok …”’

We went to Lamphoon. Again the day was overcast. But the fifteen-mile-long avenue of magnificent soaring trees, smothered in mustard-coloured blossoms as they were, would have been stirring in any fight. I made detours to the Square Pagoda and the Reclining Buddha, but Vilai, having got the promise of another two thousand as soon as the banks re-opened, had nothing further to pray for. We spent an hour in the silk-weaving factory. Vilai, in a vivid red blouse and the shiny white slacks, made all the local beauties look drab. She bought cheap cloth as presents for her maids and a length, not so cheap, for herself. Of course, I paid … Going back to the city, she seemed to have trouble with her conscience.
‘That pha
you giff me, it too dear, darling. I not want. Batter you spent your money on somesing I want very mutss. Now I no haff shob, maybe I want you buy many sings for me soon …’

Our next stop was at Silver Village. Here after two solid hours of chatter in various shops she bought a huge beaten silver bowl, and a silver stand for it, and a silver ladle, for doling out charity food to the priests. The total cost was twelve hundred tics but as I automatically reached for my wallet she stopped me. ‘No, this I buy wiss my own money. It for the God.’

‘Your money’s my money, anyway.’

‘No, after you giff me, it mine. Is what I earn.’

‘If I’d known you were going to chuck it away like this—’

‘I want some
irom
’ (painted sunshades) ‘too. One for my maid, one for cookee, one for me. You can pay for those …’

We took all the booty back to the hotel. Dan was on the verandah, making a watercolour. He looked as if he’d been waiting for us. He kept his sketchbook at such an angle that I couldn’t see what he’d been doing, but Vilai went right round to his side of the table and leaned over his shoulder, the red blouse, as I instantly noted, actually touching his ear. She looked, smiling, at his work for about ten seconds before she spoke, and I could see he was in suspense, ready to stand or fall in her sight on the effect this daub had on her. I don’t suppose she had any idea how important he thought her criticism. At last she said, ‘Humph. Very pewty. You clever boy, I sink.’ He actually flushed with pleasure, but at the same time he threw an embarrassed glance at me.

‘Thought you’d given up art,’ I said.

‘Oh, I still sketch a bit.’

‘Why you not make pickser of me?’ Vilai asked, moving away from him and making for the door of our room.

‘Gosh, if I could …’ He swung round with such eagerness that a cup full of paintwater crashed to the floor. He made an inarticulate exclamation and seemed to forget Vilai immediately, staring down at the mess in horror. Vilai laughed.

We had some orangeades with him, and invited him to go with us to Huei Keo—‘you can make pickser while I swim’—but he seemed anxious to be left behind, and returned to his work as soon as we left. He still hadn’t let me see what he was doing. ‘When it’s finished,’ he said evasively …

Huei Keo is the prettiest place in all Chiengmai. The water descends several hundred feet in a series of falls with deep clear pools between them. Bare sheer cliffs hem it in on one side, a steep forested slope on the other. I drove the car in as far as it would go and we scrambled up to the nearest deep pool. Because it was late we had the place to ourselves. Whilst I clambered further up exploring for a deeper pool Vilai, standing on a rock in midstream, undressed. Forty yards away and maybe fifty feet higher I turned round to look. Stark naked she tossed her hair and waved her green costume, her body a lovely contained form, shapely and tan amongst the greys and greens of rock and leaf and the flashes of white foam. Here, I felt, was the ecstasy which has only two notes of sadness in it, the knowledge that it cannot last, and that this particular rapture can never be repeated.

She sat on a rock and washed her clothes, soaping and rubbing and beating and twisting them in the thorough Eastern manner that removes all the dirt and pretty soon most of the fabric too. Then she took off all her jewellery except for the tinkling golden bell to which she had become so attached (because I liked it?) that it seemed to have become permanently attached to her, and dived and swam and wriggled about, stopping every minute to let water out of her ears and to rest her knee, which was still black and blue. Then she would laugh and dive again and splash again and come up laughing and spitting. I lay on various rocks and watched. I’d never wished I could swim before, never felt a bore because I couldn’t …

In the end we knew we must go. She stood on a rock and I handed her a towel and she dropped her suit to her loins and began drying herself carefully. Soon she was dressed and had put on the ring with the thirty-seven diamonds, and the other ring with its huge translucent yellow stone, and the watch with its bracelet of golden hearts, and a thin necklace with a small heart-shaped gold pendant, and pearls in her ears. Then with many backward glances we walked down to the car. We knew we’d never go back again.

Back in the hotel we bathed, and I dined on the verandah and she dozed until Dan came to talk. Then she appeared and she liked the look of the fish and had some and then she liked the smell of the coffee and had some of that too, and then she knocked some coffee all over her slacks but showed no signs of annoyance—just as when I’d knocked the beer over her skirts at the Bolero. We’d decided to go to see
City Lights
. She had no enthusiasm for Mr. Chaplin, a silly man and not hansum, but she agreed to go as a concession—a gesture of gratitude, all the more valuable as coming from such a (usually) self-centred person. We took pity on Dan and invited him to accompany us. He was pathetically pleased: the watercolour had turned out ‘a mess’ and he’d torn it up. She only took about ten minutes to get ready. I forget what she wore but I know it was pretty. She had put big gold loops in her ears instead of the usual stones. But there was nothing flashy about her appearance although every woman eyed her critically, plainly recognizing a lady from the big city. The men eyed her too of course—to the last male eye, as always.

We were too early for the show so we went, to Dan’s consternation, to a coffee-shop. He was eventually persuaded to drink an orange-crush, swarming with germs though it undoubtedly was. The germs had caught up with me (or perhaps it was all the chilli I’d been eating) and I had to leave them together for ten minutes. The trend of their conversation could be judged from the remarks Vilai made when we went to bed. ‘What Dan mean when he say he “look me up”, when he go Bangkok?’

‘He meant he’d call at your house to see you.’

‘I sink so too. He like me very mutss. He ask me he want to make luff wiss me, but he good boy, will not do ’cause now I here wiss you.’

‘Good God. Don’t mind me. Go ahead. He’s good for five hundred any day.’

‘I sink not. I sink he very poor. He say he twenty-sick, he neffer haff slip wiss girl. If he haff plenty money like you say, he must slip wiss differnunt girl every night.’

‘I know more about men than you do, darling, in spite of all your experience, and I’m telling you that guy is rolling in the stuff—yet when he tells you he’s never had a woman it’s God’s truth. You want to land him if you can.’

‘Pah. I care nussink for him. He tell me lie. Vilai neffer trust any man.’

‘I know, dear. You’re daft. You think all men are like those you make your living off. You don’t recognize good ones when you see ’em. You’ll never learn, it seems …’

That was my honest opinion at that time—that she had two exceedingly good upright young men dancing attendance on her. Dan’s infatuation was now almost painfully obvious. During dinner he’d told me a bit more about himself. It was all mixed up with
The Moon and Sixpence
. He’d convinced himself that he had nothing to say to the world in his painting. Yet he was yearning to martyr himself in some romantic way. He was currently considering devoting the rest of his life to work among the lepers. He’d been to give them a look over in half a dozen countries in Africa and Asia. He liked the Siamese type best, but he was fearful that it might be less on their account than on account of the fact that theirs was the most agreeable country to live in. He’d learned, too (and it was a sad disillusionment), that lepers could easily be taught to inject each other, and furthermore that far from being highly contagious, leprosy was quite a difficult disease for a healthy man to contract—in fact, no particular heroism was demanded of the worker among them these days. But masochism was inextricably mixed up with his idealism; although he was as Protestant as they come, he had to mortify his flesh as vigorously as any monk. The non-drinking, non-swearing, and non-smoking were all part, too, of his burning desire to crucify himself on the most splintery cross he could find. And then things like Vilai happened to him … Over my fish and soup, before Vilai had joined us, I’d waxed quite eloquent with him. I’d said that he’d started off just as I’d started off years before, observing the tablets of an outmoded Law and damaging my brain and body and spirit thereby, imposing on myself abnegations which were advocated by all my mentors and strengthened by my personal timidity, but false. ‘Such self-denial never gets a man anywhere unless he’s got religion and can turn himself into a monk,’ I’d said. ‘Like Crashaw and his “sweetly-killing dart.” It was a bloody sword going into the chest of an under-teenage girl, that’s what that “sweetly-killing dart” was. A few good nights out with something like that’—I’d jerked my head in the direction of our room—‘would have turned poor old Crashaw into a master-poet, instead of a trunkful of conceits. But you’re no poet; you’re trying to sublimate your glandular urges in good works, which is even more futile than poetry. Good works won’t unbind you, chum. You need a female chest with bubs on it, and half a bottle of
mekong
inside you—’

‘You mean you’re happy?’ he’d asked, in a tone which suggested he was damn’ sure I wasn’t; and then Vilai had appeared and we’d dropped the discussion, temporarily …

All Chiengmai seemed to have gone to see Chaplin, but at last the torrent of colours and eyes and mouths stopped pouring down the stairs, and she and Dan and I went up them. There was a long Thai propaganda film first. Photos of Korean atrocities were hardly a suitable apéritif for comedy. But it is amazing how quickly horror can be erased from the memory, especially if you have a magician waving the wand, instead of a bumbling psychiatrist … I’d never seen
City Lights
before. I revelled in it. Dan, who
had
seen it before, revelled in it. Vilai, between us, with one hand in mine, and, as I suspected but couldn’t quite make out in the darkness, her other in Dan’s, revelled in it too, much to her surprise. As fast as we translated the English captions to her she translated the Thai ones to us. The beauty of the blind girl moved her, Charlie’s hapless efforts to raise funds broke her heart, and time after time she squeezed my hand and cried, ‘Oh, I like this movie too, too mutss.’ Only at one point did her nationality assert itself: when Charlie called on the girl when her grandma was out. ‘Now he slip wiss her?’—‘No, no, of course not. He loves her with a pure flame.’—‘Of course he slip wiss her. Her Mama go out. He giff her money and she ride in his car. She
must
let him slip wiss her.’—‘No, sweetheart, no.’

Back in the hotel she said, ‘Not want you slip wiss me tonight. I tired. Tomollow night slip all night togesser.’

‘That’s a promise,’ I said.

I was supposed to wake her at five-thirty next morning so that I could go to the station to book our seats for the return journey while she got ready to go to market; but at six it was she who woke me. I spent an hour kicking my heels in the station-master’s office before he showed up. Grudgingly he granted us berths fifteen and sixteen—next door to the toilet, which I knew Vilai would be angry about, for that department really stinks on Thai trains. I hurried back through the morning mists. She was just about ready to go out. She peered through Dan’s verandah window as we passed. ‘Lacy boy. He still slip.’ I wished she wouldn’t show so much interest in him. But she was off to the market with
me
.

It was six years, she alleged, since she’d last gone to early morning market. She made up for lost time. She first bought a glass jar to put one of the more obscene-looking messes in, and then a big hamper which she gradually filled and I carried. She darted from stall to stall, bargaining and laughing and happy. A Thai market is certainly one of the sights of this world. In few places are so many varieties of meat, fruit, fish, vegetable, and amalgams thereof, brought together in joyous juxtaposition. In few countries do such gay, handsome, brightly-clad people do the buying and selling. The smells also are intoxicating in number and variety. I was intoxicated with Vilai too. I enjoyed myself as much as she did. Everybody stared at us, the tall fair foreigner and his Thai wife with her expensive tastes in jewellery and her very Thai tastes in grub. We were there for more than an hour. I had seldom seen her so animated, except professionally.