Free The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard Page B

Praya, arriving from Amoy or Swatow, or from green Saigon.
    The office was in the bank building, the best building, the white block formed like a cenotaph that had been pointed out to Exley at the time of his arrival: the highest building, and the only one air-conditioned. The bank had thrown over the historic slow rotations of the ceiling fan in favour of the new climate, man-made. This building of thirteen storeys was, one was told, the tallest between San Francisco and Cairo. Exley, however, had a cubicle on a low floor, in a set of rooms occupied by fellow officers. A group of translators in an inner room were local staff. There was an Admiralty clerk, on loan, who did the legal drafting, and a naval messenger had a chair near the door.
    Three servicewomen worked in a room next to Exley's own: none of them pretty, none really young. One of them, Miss Brenda Mills, showed signs of ill nature. Of the other two, Exley could not be sure which was Monica and which Norah, and left it too long to ask. All three lived at the Helena May Hostel above the town. Each had been taken out in turn by the British officers on the floor, who had nothing favourable to report. One other woman in the office was Eurasian, of Portuguese descent. This was the typist, Miss Rita Xavier. There were, also, two Cantonese amahs, who brought tea thickened with condensed milk, cleaned the rooms, and in their tiny antechamber laughed with gold teeth at the pidgin jokes of the Admiralty clerk, who puffed his pipe at them in passing.
    Here, through mornings and long afternoons, Peter Exley explored a heap of files and despaired of justice. His office had access to a terrace paved in big red tiles, undulated by the rains. The terrace, rarely used, looked towards the harbour.
    Seagulls wheeled there, and a cormorant at times alighted. On fair days, Exley would go out and lean awhile on the wide ledge. Would look at the war memorial on its patch of lawn, and at the parked cars and parked palm trees, and the sea beyond. The heat soon drove him indoors. Even so, he got a name for mooning.
    That first summer, in the steaming evenings, he would leave the barracks and walk east or west until the long streets became entirely, incontrovertibly Chinese. He would stroll past the hundred thousand stalls and tiny shops of food, of clothes, of soap and pots and bamboo baskets; past the minuscule dens hung with lanterns and braying out harsh music, where the soft smell of opium exuded into fumes of the street. From what would once have enthralled him he would bring away only a flare of alien colour and raucous sound, a stench of crowds and cooking; and that scent, sickly as boredom.
    Having walked in this way an hour or two, he would then return by some divergent route, perhaps along the docks — ignoring appeals from vendors or beggars and the offers from women whose negligible bodies seemed weighted with gold teeth and platform shoes. It was difficult to invest those meagre frames with sensuality, or to covet the lean shanks displayed by the flowered dress slit to the thigh. In these districts, Roy Rysom claimed to cut his swath almost nightly. Yet at the end of his own excursions Exley would often discover Rysom having dinner tamely enough — tame hardly describing Rysom's way with chopsticks — at the King Fu in Des Voeux Road, where a scattering of officers was always to be found. Sometimes Exley sat down with Rysoms group, giving himself over to the uproar of loud companions, the clamour of Chinese diners and of waiters yelling to the kitchen. From the gallery above there was the incessant clack and crash of the mah-jongg pieces, the spitting and shouting of the players.
    His fellow soldiers repeated the stale anecdotes of lonely men. If anyone told a joke against himself, Rysom laughed too loud — his need for advantage vigilant as fear. If they walked back together to the barracks, Rysom, turning oracular, would caution Exley against his expeditions in the