Free Suddenly at Singapore by Gavin Black

easy for men to switch on the sentiment about place. You know something, I can remember seeing a revival of a Greta Garbo picture in which she goes round the room where she had been happy with her boy friend kissing bits of the furniture. I laughed myself silly”
    “I hope you still would,” I said.
    “Yes, I still would. I won’t waste time on the furniture. At the same time this is something terribly special for me, you’ve got to allow that. I want the feeling for just a little that this is our world that nothing can intrude on. That’s the way you want it, too, isn’t it?”
    “Of course.”
    “So long as I’m sure,” she said.
    I went out, not feeling too happy, to have a bath. I changed into a clean shirt which had also come from Gemas and went down the stairs. There were three miners in the rest house from the tin place at Sungei Goloh back in the hills, in to the nearest bar for a couple of days. They offered their society at once and I had a drink with them. I told them I was an agent for de Vorwooerd’s chicle, an excuse I’d used before in the place.
    “Don’t tell me that’s your secretary?” one of them asked.
    “No, American journalist. Writing up chewing gum”
    “Is she interested in tin mines? I could show her the deepest one in the world. I didn’t think girls who looked like that ever left Singapore.”
    It took me twenty minutes to get away from them. I couldn’t see now that peaceful evening with drinks on the veranda. The miners would stay half sober this time and put on the gramophone and Kate would have to dance with them. I went up a street wondering how she was going to like that.
    De Vorwooerd’s house was down by the river, with a garden that ran down to it. The whole place was surrounded by an enormous hibiscus hedge which he had planted and cultivated, perhaps from an urge to put a screen about what was left of his life. There was an arched wooden gate you couldn’t see through and from this a path straight up to the veranda steps.
    It was a new house, but built in the old manner of wood and thatch, with a series of rooms falling back from the porches, all softly lit and the boy never put out any of those lights until de Vorwooerd went to bed. It was the kind of house which offers you choice the moment you go in, almost choice for moods, the verandas which were mainly screened and hung with plants and green lights, where you could hear the sea, or the main room with one wall of books, with an arch from it to a dining-room and beyond that de Vorwooerd’s study.
    That was where I found the old man. No boy had met me, I had simply walked through rooms until I found him. He was sitting in a chair under a reading light beamed on to his book. His scanty hair was white and also his clipped Vandyke beard. His skin was wrinkled, but brown and nut-like, healthy looking, his eyes a bright blue. He looked at me, put in a bookmark and closed his book.
    “Well,” he said. “I was hoping it was a mistake.”
    “I hadn’t any choice.”
    “You mean you were rattled?”
    “No. Jeff told me he was expecting this. The whole of the straits are patrolled. There is no other way. I’d have come here even if I hadn’t heard from Kim Sung.”
    “He told me about using the phone. Madness.”
    “He’s been here?”
    “Yes. Gone away again. Back to his junks. They’re in an estuary of the river.”
    “He had no trouble getting the stuff off the Misuni Maru ?”
    “I didn’t ask him. Paul, this is madness!” He gestured with his hands. His beard twitched as though he was trying to control the movement of his face. “I’m still not over what happened to your brother. Sickened.”
    “Yes.”
    “I couldn’t write. An old man sitting here. I couldn’t write. What could I have said on paper?”
    “Don’t talk about it, de Vorwooerd.”
    “No. We won’t talk about it. Send them away. Send your junks away.”
    “I can’t.”
    “You could easily enough. You’ve only to give the