Dessert at the Belvedere

"My others are at the cleaner's," I said, even as I was rolling "I've just come from a funeral" around on my tongue. But that would have made him ask who had died. I had the fluent liar's sense of foresight. Gunstone was calmed.

Lunch was the Tanglin Club's Friday special, my favorite, seafood buffet. I followed Gun-stone's lead, taking the same things he did, but I soon found that my plate was overloaded with oysters and prawns rather than the crab and lobster, which Gunstone had taken in two small helpings. I put some oysters back and got a frown from the Malay chef.

Gunstone was one of my first clients, a man in his 70s who had come to Singapore when it was no more than a rubber estate with a few rows of shophouses and godowns. During the war, he had been captured by the Japanese and put to work on the Siamese Death Railway. He had told me a story about burying his best friend near the Burmese border and had made it sound like a testimonial to loyalty. It was my abiding fear that Gunstone's (continued on page 90) Dessert at the Belvedere(continued from page 83) engine would stop one day in some hotel room reserved in my name. And then I'd have explaining to do.

When we'd got to our table, I said, "I hope I haven't boobed, Mr. Gunstone, but I've fixed you up at the Belvedere this afternoon."

He stabbed a prawn, peeled off its shell and dunked the naked finger of pink meat into a saucer of chili paste. "Don't believe we've ever been to the Belvedere before, have we, Jack?"

"The other places were full," I said.

"Quite all right," he said. "But I ate at the Belvedere last week. It wasn't much good, you know."

"I know what you mean, Mr. Gun-stone. That food is perfectly hideous."

"Exactly," he said. "How's your salmon?"

I took a forkful, smeared it with mayonnaise and ate it. "Delicious," I said.

"Mine's awful," he said and pushed the salmon to the side of his plate.

"Now that you mention it," I said, "it does taste rather--"

"Desiccated," said Gunstone.

"Exactly," I said. I pushed my salmon over to the side and covered it with a lettuce leaf. I was sorry; I liked salmon the way it tasted out of a can.

"Lobster's pretty dreadful, too," said Gunstone a moment later.

I was just emptying a large claw. It was excellent, and I ate the whole claw before saying, "Right again, Mr. Gunstone. Tastes like they fished it out of the Muar River."

"We'll shunt that over, shall we?" said Gunstone. He moved a lobster tail next to the discarded salmon.

I did the same, then, as quickly as I could, ate all my crab salad before he could say it was bad. I gnawed a hard roll and started on the oysters.

"The prawns are a success," he said.

"The oysters are"--I didn't want to finish the sentence, but Gunstone was no help--"sort of limp."

"They're cockles, actually," said Gunstone. "And they're a damned insult. Steward!" A Malay waiter came over. "Take this away."

Demanding that food be sent back to the kitchen is a special skill. It is done with panache by people who use that word. I admired people who did it but could not imitate them.

"Yours, tuan?" asked the waiter.

"Yes, take it away," I said sadly.

"Do you want more, tuan?" the waiter asked Gunstone.

"If I wanted more, would I be asking you to remove that plate?" Gunstone asked.

The waiter slid my lunch away. I buttered a hard roll and ate it, making crumbs shower down the front of my suit.

"That steward," said Gunstone, shaking his head. "The most intelligent thing I ever heard him say was, 'If you move your lump of ice cream a bit to the right, tuan, you will find a strawberry.' God help us."

I laughed and brushed my jacket. "Still," I said, "I wouldn't mind joining this club."

"You don't want to join this club," said Gunstone.

"I do," I said, and saw myself lying in the sun, by the pool, and one of those tanned long-legged women whispering urgently, Jack, where have you been? I've been looking everywhere for you. It's all set.

"Why, whatever for?"

"A place to go, I suppose," I said. The Bandung, where I spent my spare time, had nothing to boast of except the sentiment printed on its matchboxes: there's always someone you know at the Bandung!

Gunstone chuckled. "If they can pronounce your name, you can join."

"Flowers is pretty easy."

"I should say so!"

But Fiori isn't, I thought. And Fiori was my name, Flowers an approximation and a mask.

"Now," said Gunstone, looking at his watch, "how about dessert?"

Gunstone's joke: It was time to fetch Djamila.

The old-timers, I found, tended to prefer Malays, while the newcomers went for the Chinese, and the Malays preferred each other. The Chinese clients, of whom I had several, liked the big-boned Australian girls; Germans were fond of Tamils; and the English fellers liked anything young but preferred their girls boyish and their women mannish. British sailors from H. M. S. Terror enjoyed fighting each other in the presence of transvestites. Americans liked clean sporty ones, to whom they would give nicknames, like "Skeezix" and "Pussycat" (the English made an effort to learn the girl's real name), and would spend a whole afternoon trying to teach one of my girls how to swim in a hotel pool, although it was costing them $15 an hour to do it. Americans also went in for a lot of hugging in the taxi, smooching and kidding around and sort of stumbling down the sidewalk, gripping the girl hard and saying, "Aw, honey, whoddle Ah do?" Later they wrote them letters and the girls pestered me to help them reply.

Djamila--"Jampot," an American feller used to call her, and it suited her--was very reliable and easy to contact. She was waiting by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with my trusty suitcase as we pulled up in the taxi. I hopped out and opened the door for her, then got into the front seat and put the suitcase between my knees. Djamila climbed in with Gunstone and sat smiling, rocking her handbag in her lap.

Smiling is something girls with buck teeth seldom do with any pleasure; Djamila showed hers happily, charming things, very white in her broad mouth. She had small ears, a narrow moonlit face, large darting eyes and heavy eyebrows. A slight girl, even skinny, but having said that, one would have to add that her breasts were large and full, her bum high and handsome as a pumpkin. Her breasts were her virtue, the virtue of most of my Malay girls; they appeared to be worn or carried, and, unlike the Chinese bulbs that disappeared in a frock fold, these were a pair of substantial jugs, something extra that moved and made a rolling wobble of a Malay girl's walk. That was the measure of acceptable size, that bobbing, one a second later than the other, each responding to the step of Djamila's small feet. Her bottom moved on the same prompting, but in a different rhythm, a wonderful agitation in the willowy body, a glorious heaving to and fro, the breasts nodding in the black lace of the tight-waisted blouse, the packed-in bum lifting, one buttock pumping against the other, creeping around her sarong as she shuffled, showing her big teeth.

"Jack, you looking very smart," said Djamila. "New suit and what not. But why you wear that?"

"I put it on for you, sweetheart," I said. "This here's Mr. Gunstone, an old pal of mine."

Djamila shook his hand and said, "Jack got nice friends."

"Where's that little car of yours, Jack?" Gunstone asked.

"It packed up," I said. "Being fixed."

"What's the trouble this time?"

"Suspension, I think. Front end sort of shimmies, like Djamila but not as pretty."

"It's always the way with those little French cars. Problems. It's the workmanship."

The taxi pulled in front of the Belvedere. The doorman in a top hat and tails snatched the door open and let Gunstone out. I handed over the suitcase; it was a good solid Antler, a sober pebbly gray, filled with copies of the Straits Times and an R. A. F. first-aid kit, a useful item--once we had to use the tourniquet on a Russian seaman, and the little plasters were always handy for scratches.

"You should get yourself a Morris," said Gunstone at the reception desk.

I could not answer right away, because I was signing my name on the register and the clerk was welcoming me with a (continued on page 206)Dessert at the Belvedere(continued from page 90) copy of What's On in Singapore. I was not worried about being asked about Gunstone and Djamila; anything is possible in a big expensive hotel, and the accommodating manager will always smile and say he remembers you. In the elevator, I said, "Yes, your Morris is a good buy."

"I like Chevy," said Djamila.

The elevator boy and the bellhop stared at her. My girls looked fine, very pretty in bars and on the street, but in well-lighted hotels, they looked different--not out of place but prominent and identifiable.

"I hate these American cars," said Gunstone.

"So do I," I said. "Waste of money."

"Nice and big," said Djamila. She gave a low, throaty laugh. Most of my girls have bad throats. Something to do with their line of work--all those germs.

"Here you are, sah. Seven-oh-five," said the bellhop. He followed us in and swung the suitcase onto a low table. I could hear the newspapers shifting inside. He hadn't quite figured out the situation. He started his spiel about the lights and if-there's-anything-you-want, but I gave him 50 cents and pointed toward the door.

"Your lights," I said, pushing the switch. "Your TV, your washroom, your wireless"--trying to add a slight air to the occasion. The theme from Doctor Zhivago came in on the radio, helping a bit. "I think everything is in order."

"You couldn't do better than a Morris," said Gunstone. He creaked over and took me by the arm. "What's she like?" he asked in a whisper. I began to have a hideous feeling that this was, indeed, his last stand. Killed in action on the Belvedere border; destroyed while attacking a jampot.

"Oh, very rewarding," I said.

Djamila was sitting on the edge of the double bed, removing her silver bracelets with dainty grace, admiring her arm, displaying her pretty fingernails to herself as she pulled each bracelet past them.

Gunstone, in a stuffed chair, seemed to breathe with difficulty as he twisted off one of his shoes. Then he pulled off the sock and began to try to poke the limp thing into his shoe with a trembling forefinger.

That was too much for me. I'm not the type of feller who goes in for symbols, but that was too much for me. On my way to the door, I said, as heartily as I could, "I'll leave you two to get on with it. Bye for now."

The elevator boy, seeing the feller he had just deposited on that floor, looked away from me, at the button he was punching, and I could tell from the movement of his ears and a peculiar tightening of a section of scalp on the back of his head that he had summed up the situation and was grinning foolishly. I felt like socking him.

"What's your name?"

"Tony-lah," he said. A person sobers up when he has to tell a stranger his name.

"Here you are, Tony." I handed him a dollar. "Don't blab," I said. "Nobody likes a blabber."

That dollar would have come in handy, and 1 could have saved it if I had gone down the fire stairs, which was what I usually did. But seven flights of dusty-smelling unpainted cement was more than a man my age should tolerate. A little arithmetic satisfied me that I could afford one drink; in the Belvedere lounge-bar, the hors d'oeuvres were free.

Avoiding the lobby, I nipped into the lounge, found a cool leather armchair and sat very happily for a few minutes reading What's On and looking up every so often to admire the decor. Some of my friends did not think much of the new Singapore hotels--too shiny and tacky, they said: no character at all. Character was weevils in your food, metal folding chairs and a grouchy barman who insulted you as he overcharged you; it was a monsoon drain that hadn't been cleared for months and a toilet--like the one in the Bandung--located in the middle of the kitchen. Someday, I thought, I'm going to reserve a room at the Belvedere and burrow in the blankets of a wide bed--the air conditioner on full--and sleep for a week. The ground floor of the Belvedere was Italian marble and there was a chandelier hanging in the lobby that must have taken years to make. I was enjoying myself in the solid comfort, sipping my gin, looking at a sea-shell mural on the lounge wall, periwinkles spilling out of conchs, gilded sea urchins and fingers of coral; but I became anxious.

It was not only my habitual worry about Gunstone's engine failing. It was the annoying suspicion that the seven or eight tourists there in the lounge were staring in my direction. They had seen me come in with Gunstone and Djamila and, like Tony, they had guessed what I was up to. The ones who weren't laughing at me despised me. If I had been younger, they would have said, Ah, what a sharp lad, a real operator--you've got to hand it to him; but a middle-aged man doing the same tiling was a dull dirty procurer. I tried to look unruflled, crossing my legs and flicking through the little pamphlet. Recrossing my legs, I felt an uncommon breeze against my ankles: I wasn't wearing any socks.

How could I be so stupid? There I was in the lounge of an expensive hotel, wearing my black Ah Chum worsted, my spotless collar and shoes my amah had buffed to a high gloss--but sockless! That was how they guessed my trade, by my nude ankles. I wanted to leave, but I couldn't without calling attention to myself. So I sat in the chair in a way that made it possible for me to push at the knees of my pants and lower my cuffs over my ankles. I tried to convince myself that these staring tourists didn't matter--they'd all be on the morning flight to Bangkok.

I lifted my drink and caught a lady's eye. She looked away. Returning to my reading, I sensed her eyes drift over to me again. You never knew with these American ladies; they made faces at each other in public, sometimes hilarious ones, a sisterly foolishness. The other people began staring. They were making me miserable, ruining the only drink I could afford.

"Telephone call for Brishop Bradley . . . Bishop Bradley. . . ." The slow demanding announcement came over the loud-speaker in the lounge, a cloth-faced box on the wall above a slender palm in a copper pot. No one got up.

Two ladies looked at the loud-speaker. It stopped, the voice and the hum behind it; there was an expectant pause in the lounge, everyone holding his breath, knowing the announcement would start again in a moment, which it did, monotonously.

"Bishop Bradley . . . telephone call for Bishop Bradley. . . ."

Now no one was looking at the loudspeaker.

I had fastened all the buttons on my black suit jacket. I stood up and turned an impatient face to the repeated command coming from the cloth-faced box. I swigged the last of my gin and, with the eyes of all those people on me and the clerical garb I was wearing, strode in the direction of the information desk. I knew that now they were sorry for staring at my sockless ankles, for judging me prematurely. "There goes the bishop," they were saying.

To keep up the show, I paused at the desk and mumbled something; then I walked out to Orchard Road with a stately episcopal pace. I waited there nervously.

After a little while, though, Gunstone and Djamila appeared in the hotel doorway and I offered up a small prayer of thanksgiving: He had pulled through. The old boy's engine had not stopped in the Belvedere.