The Chequer Board (31 page)

She said, “Did he say that? I’m sorry I got frightened.” And then she hesitated, and said, “Will he be coming back here, after he comes out of hospital?”

The Major shook his head. “Not after this. He’ll be drafted to another theater of war altogether probably.”

He said good-bye to her and walked out and down the street to where the jeep was waiting for him in front of the White Hart. He looked in to see Mr Frobisher, and found the landlord at his tea. He refused an invitation to join the meal. “I just looked in to say it’s all okay about that court-martial,” he said. “I had a talk with Miss Trefusis. She doesn’t want us to go on with it. I’ll have to make out my report in those terms for the Staff Judge-Advocate. I’d say he’ll wash it out.”

“Aye?” said Mr Frobisher. “Well, that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking.”

“And to mine,” the Major said. “I just stepped in to let you know.”

He got into the jeep, and drove up to the camp. Mr Frobisher went back to his tea, gratified with the success he had achieved, and told his daughter Bessie about it.
Half an hour later Bessie was telling Sergeant Lorimer; an hour later it was all around the village.

Up in the camp Major Mark T. Curtis sat with Colonel McCulloch, facing him across the office desk. “I guess we’ll have to drop the whole thing, Colonel,” he was saying. “We haven’t got a case.”

“Not got a case against a goddam nigger when he catches a white girl in a dark street and kisses her against her will?” the Colonel asked indignantly.

“No,
sir
. If she’d been six months older, she wouldn’t have taken it so seriously. As things are, she won’t give evidence against him.”

Colonel McCulloch started in and told the Major just exactly what he thought of British girls. It lasted for ten minutes, till the Major had to leave to catch his train.

Down in the White Hart the Negroes were jubilant and, curiously, much more interested in the war; they listened to the nine o’clock news in almost complete silence. During the evening a Negro hand pulled the cardboard placard out of the window. With furtive laughter they added three words to it, and put it back again. It stayed there all next day till somebody called Mr Frobisher’s attention to it, reading:

Mr Frobisher took it out of the window and stuck it down beside his chair in the back parlour. It seemed to him that it had served its turn.

Next evening when the Negroes came down to the White Hart, they came with long faces. They had spent all day packing up; they had received surprise orders for a move to some new and unknown location. In any case, their work was practically finished; they would move along and make another airfield somewhere else.

They brought a present of a ham and a box of cigars for Mr Frobisher, and a huge box of candy and a dozen pairs of sheer silk stockings for Bessie. “We been treated mighty nice since we been here,” said Sergeant Lorimer. “The boys all say they never liked a place so much as this.”

At closing time they left for the last time. Exhausted with all the leavetaking and handshaking, Mr Frobisher stood with his daughter waving to the last of them as they went up the street towards the camp. They vanished out of sight, and Mr Frobisher moved slowly to shoot the bolts of the street door.

“Eh, well,” he said, straightening up, “that’s the end o’ that.”

His daughter said, a little wistfully, “Do you think well ever see any of them again?”

Her father shook his head. “Soldiers come and go in times like these,” he said. “We’ll never see them no more.”

Morgan finished and no one spoke for a long time.

M
R
T
URNER
slept quietly and well that night, his last night in Mandinaung. Morgan had sent a boy running to Danubyu with a telegram reserving for him a passage on a plane for England. Mr Turner slept in the knowledge that in a week or so he would be back home in Watford telling Mollie all about it. He felt that he would like to do that. He had parted from his wife on different terms from those which were his custom; he wanted to get back to her, to see her again and tell her all that he had done. And he was very anxious to get home to Watford before he had another fall. He knew that would happen sometime. He wanted to be with someone who would look after him when it did happen.

He woke at dawn, turned back his net, rested and at ease, and lay and watched the light creep up over the wide river. The white cat, Maung Payah, walked in at the doorless entrance to his room, jumped up on to his bed, and lay down beside him. Mr Turner said, “Hullo, puss,” and lay stroking its head and tickling its ear. He was a little saddened at the thought that he was leaving Burma so soon after his arrival; he would have liked to stay longer,
to see more. Nay Htohn had pointed out the ridge of the Pegu Yoma on the far horizon and told him it was lovely there; she had urged him to stay a little longer and get up into the hills of the Shan States. Others would see these places, but not he. Burma for Mr Turner was a thought of loveliness. He had seen a fringe of it and knew that it was there; he would carry that knowledge back with him to Watford, enlarged and enriched by it, content if not satisfied.

He was with Nay Htohn alone for a few minutes after breakfast, on the verandah, as they waited for the steamer to come in sight around the bend of the river.

“When you see Phillip’s mother,” she said quietly, “try and make her like me. I know she does not like me now. That is curious, because we have never met. I know that it is difficult for old people in England to understand a mixed marriage like ours. It’s difficult here, too. Some of my aunts think that I have done a dreadful thing in marrying an Englishman. But we have been very happy so far, and I do not fear the future. Try and make his mother understand.”

Mr Turner said, “I’ll try. I’ll go and tell her just how you live, and what you have for dinner, and how you run the house, and that. But you mustn’t expect too much. She’s old, and she’s an invalid, too. I don’t think she ever goes out.”

Nay Htohn smiled. “That is the trouble with the English,” she said. “They so seldom go out, to see for themselves.”

He sat talking to Morgan and his wife until the steamer came in sight up the river; then they got into the jeep and
drove down to the jetty. The steamer came in and berthed for her few minutes’ stay. Morgan carried Mr Turner’s suitcase on board and found his cabin. They went out on deck, and found the captain waiting for Morgan to go ashore before casting off.

Morgan held out his hand. “Well, this is good-bye,” he said. “Thanks a lot for coming, Turner. If ever you get a chance, come out for a longer stay and I’ll take you up country for a tour.” He said that because it is the sort of thing you do say, even when you know, or perhaps because you do know, that it can never happen.

Mr Turner shook his hand. “You’ve seen the last o’ me,” he said simply. “I’d like to have seen the Shan Hills, ’n all that, but I won’t now. Still, I’ve seen things I never thought to see when I was working in the flour business. I’ll go ’n see your mother soon as I get back.”

Nay Htohn said, “Good-bye, Mr Turner. We are very proud to have had you staying in our house.”

He smiled, thinking that at last her perfect English had betrayed her. “Wish I could have stayed a bit longer,” he said. “But I got to be getting on.” He grinned. “I haven’t got much time.”

Morgan and Nay Htohn went on to the jetty; the moorings were cast off, and the steamer pulled out into the stream. They stood close together, waving. Mr Turner stood on the upper deck, waving to them in turn until they dwindled in the distance, and were gone.

The captain, a Burman, paused by him, and said, “You have been staying with Mr Morgan?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner, “just for a day or two. I haven’t seen him since the war.”

The captain said, “He is a very fine man, and he married into a very good family. One day he will be a member of the Government.”

Mr Turner settled down in a deck chair, smoking his cheroot and figuring the cost of it as the river scene passed by him. Cheroots in Mandinaung cost two rupees twelve annas for a hundred, or about three a penny, a price which Nay Htohn considered to be gross extortion and nearly double what they should be. They were good big cigars, mild and satisfying, with a filter tip of pith; Mr Turner considered that in a London shop they were worth a shilling of anybody’s money. He had no intention of returning to London out of pocket by this journey. He travelled thoughtfully down river, and when he reached Rangoon he telephoned to his Chinese agent, Mr S. O. Chang, from his hotel bedroom, sitting on the bed as he would have done in Birmingham or Hull. He said:

“Afternoon, Mr Chang—I just got back from Mandinaung. Yes, I had a very good time. I’m leaving for England day after tomorrow, but before I go I thought it would be kind of nice to ship a few of these Burma cheroots back home, and see what I could do with them. You know, the Danubyu ones with the filter tip. Suppose a chap wanted to buy a little parcel of them, say about twenty thousand, how would he set about it?”

Mr Chang told him, thrusting his own finger deep into the pie. Mr Turner pulled it out a bit next day, and left for England at the end of the week, having seen the packing cases sealed and delivered to the shipping company. He travelled home by air, as he had come, in a great flying
boat from the Rangoon River. For four days he dozed across the world, rested and relaxed in the cool air as the burning deserts of Sind and Arabia passed slowly far below and gave place to the Libyan sands, the blue wastes of the Mediterranean, and the small fields of France. He ate a good deal and slept a good deal, and he got back to England at the beginning of August, just a month from the day he left.

He had not told his wife which day he was arriving because he did not know himself. From the airway terminus he took a taxi to the underground, and travelled out to Watford, carrying his bag, as he had done so many times returning from a business trip into the provinces. It was a warm afternoon, so he took a taxi at the station, and he opened his front door with his latchkey and walked in.

The house was empty, but there were food and fresh milk in the larder, and the kettle on the gas stove was still faintly warm. He diagnosed that his wife had been there at lunchtime and had made herself a cup of tea. “At the pictures,” he said thoughtfully, “or else over with Laura.” He did not resent her absence, for he had not told her when he was arriving. He prowled around the house for a short time, savouring his old familiar things, and presently he found The Daily Express, and carried a deck chair out into the garden, and sat down to read the paper. But in a very short time it was draped across his face, and he was lying back at ease.

Funny to think that Mollie was at the pictures, and Nay Htohn, she liked the pictures, just the same. The same pictures, too. Funny to think that Nay Htohn was
living seven thousand miles away, right the other side of the world. Funny the way he’d sort of felt at home in her house, in spite of everything being different.

He slept.

His wife, returning from the pictures, came to the French window of the sitting room and saw him sitting there asleep on the lawn of their long, narrow strip of garden; her heart leaped at the sight of him, for she had missed him very much. The knowledge that she would not have him for much longer had given him an added value to her. She had wanted to meet him on his way home from so long a journey, and to make him welcome. He had eluded her, and here he was, as always, asleep with a newspaper across his face, as though he had been no farther than the office or the warehouse at Gravesend. A momentary wave of disappointment swept over her, and a little irritation; she had wanted so much to do something special for him, and the opportunity was gone.

She walked down the garden and stood by his chair. “Well, you’re a fine one,” she said amiably, “slinking in like that without a word, and going off to sleep with a newspaper, after being half across the world and all. Ain’t you got no romance in you?”

He opened his eyes, and brushed away the paper. “Hullo,” he said vaguely. “I must have dropped off.”

“I’ll say you did.” She smiled down at him. “You might have let me know when you were coming. I’d have come to meet you, or something.”

He said, “I didn’t know, myself.”

“Did you have a good trip? You’re home much quicker
than I thought you’d be, going all that way. It’s only just a month since you left.”

“Aye,” he said, “just about a month. There wasn’t much to do when I got there, so I come home again.”

She said, “Pretty hopeless, was it?”

He looked up. “Hopeless? What d’you mean?”

“This chap that you went out to see, the pilot fellow. Couldn’t you do nothing for him?”

“
For
him?” Mr Turner smiled thoughtfully. “I got a bit of a surprise,” he said. “It’s not like we thought at all. He’s got a better job than I have, and lives ever so much better, too. Great big house he lives in, with about five servants. He’s all right.”

She said, puzzled, “But I thought he lived with a native woman.” And then, curiously, “Did you see her?”

“Aye,” said Mr Turner. “As nice a girl as any that you’d find in Watford, or in Harrow, either. It’s quite different to what we thought.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Could she speak any English?”

“Better ’n you or me,” said Mr Turner. “I tell you, Mr Morgan done very well for himself when he got rid of the other one and married her. Two lovely little kids, they’ve got.”

She said impulsively, “But whatever colour are the children?”

“Yellowy,” he replied. “Sort of half-and-half, you might say.”

“How awful!”

“I dunno,” said Mr Turner. “Things look sort of different
out there to what they do back here. Let’s have a cup o’ tea, and I’ll tell you.”

She studied him with some concern over tea. In the month that he had been away he had changed, and not for the better. He seemed well and cheerful, but a little shrunken, and with a good deal less energy. The disability of his right hand was markedly increased, and he had difficulty in using it for cutting his food with a knife; he made increasing use of his left hand. She realised heavily that this was one of the things that must be; from now on he would need her more and more.