more than a month old? The jams and the tinned puddings and the salted hams would be as fresh as the day they were packed. The young women would be spirited and beautiful, and the wives and soldiers returning from a visit home would be full of stories of family and friends. The break from the monotony of life in a colonial outpost and the drudgery of a strictly regulated military or commercial routine was more welcome than a cool bath at the end of the day and a gin and tonic before dinner at the club.
Francis, who clutched a small bouquet of flowers, had been beside himself for days. While he had been anticipating Annabelle’s arrival, at the same time he was dreading that she would be disappointed and would want to turn around and head straight back to England. Sutty had tried everything to keep him distracted from his own thoughts, including playing gin rummy for toothpicks, reading aloud back issues of the London Times as well as David Copperfield, the only one of his books Francis had professed not to have read. But he couldn’t be with him every hour and Francis had turned up for breakfast the last three days looking like he’d been out all night on one of the ubiquitous fishing boats that brought in the night’s catch as the sun was rising.
“Can you see her yet?” Francis asked, standing on his toes and craning his neck to add another couple of inches to his height.
“No, not yet,” replied Sutty. “But I’m sure she’ll be in your arms within the hour.” He silently said a prayer that Annabelle was on the ship. It was entirely possible that she had decided at the last minute not to come, and had not written Francis to let him know. She had been so reluctant that Sutty was more surprised than Francis when she had agreed to come. They had both been counting the days since then, Francis because he wanted so much to be with her again, and Sutty because he wanted Francis to finally set aside his disquiet and come back down to earth. He didn’t know a man could sustain such a degree of anxiety without succumbing to something worse, like catatonia or fever, or even suicide. She’d better be on that ship or she’ll be hearing from me, Sutty thought, silently composing the cable he would send straightaway.
“I don’t see her,” bleated Francis, like a lost sheep. This must be what the poets meant by “lovesick,” Sutty thought. Francis was literally sick with love and longing.
“The ship hasn’t docked yet,” he said, trying to sound patient and reasonable. “Maybe she’s finishing her packing and hasn’t come up on deck yet. Or maybe she’s there and you just haven’t spotted her.”
But he might as well have saved his breath. Francis wasn’t listening and there wasn’t anything he wanted to hear from Sutty except: “There she is. I see her now.”
The business of docking a ship is a slow one, and Sutty wished he’d delayed their arriving at the port by at least another hour. Standing here with Francis, watching and waiting, was excruciating. It would have been easier to have a tooth pulled.
“Why don’t we go and have a drink?” he suggested. “It’s going to be a while before they start letting the passengers off, and then there’s customs and all that nonsense. No point standing out here in the hot sun.”
“No,” said Francis. “She’ll be expecting to see me and if I’m not here she’ll be frightened. I’d better wait. She’s never been outside England before, let alone in a place as foreign as this. I mean, it’s not like going to France or Germany, is it? She won’t know what to make of it.”
“All right,” said Sutty, giving in to the inevitable. “But let’s at least wait in the shade.”
They found some shelter from the blazing sun beneath an overhang and watched as the giant passenger ship slowly slid into port, guided by a couple of stubby-looking tugs. It was a thing of beauty to see and it brought back to Sutty the urge to travel that ships and the sea always gave him. How many passenger ships and freighters had he boarded, with nothing but a portmanteau and a satchel of books, to search out some distant outpost in the jungle, some place he had heard about from captain or crew, where almost nobody ever went but where there was always a story or two to be heard from lonely men sent to the outer reaches of the Empire? If Francis suffered from lovesickness, did Sutty suffer from wanderlust? Absolutely, he thought. Sometimes he ached from it, longed to be on the move, to feel the miles moving under him, taking him further away from where he was and bringing him closer to wherever he was going.
“I think I see her,” said Francis, wishing he had brought a pair of binoculars. “Over there,” he told Sutty, pointing to a section near the ship’s stern. “See?” Sutty couldn’t make out anyone, let alone a young woman travelling alone. But he went along with Francis’s sighting to keep them both occupied.
“I think so,” he said. “Bravo.”
He followed Francis, who was moving closer to the landing dock, but the surge of people ahead of them was almost impenetrable.
“Damn!” said Francis. “I hope she can see me.” He started waving his arms and calling, “Annabelle, Annabelle” at the top of his voice, but it was an act of futility. The din was almost deafening, and it escalated with each new activity from the direction of the ship. When the gangplank was finally in place, and the first of the passengers began to descend, Sutty watched Francis’s face change expression from expectant, to joyful, to disappointed, and back to expectant again every time a young woman stepped onto the gangway joining ship to ground.
Sutty closed his eyes and muttered a silent prayer. Please, please be here.
Francis, too, was saying his own prayer. For if Annabelle had come and wanted only to turn back, he would be at his wits’ end. He would have no solution to offer. He would be beaten, brokenhearted, bottomed out, and buggered. It would mean going back to England, getting a job he would hate, and giving up his dream of being a writer. He couldn’t stay on in Singapore without her. He’d learned that much in the few months they’d been apart. He’d made a few friends. There were the boys from Guthrie’s he’d met at the weekend cricket matches. They’d had some good times and were a jolly bunch. And there was Sutty, of course, who was always there to pick up the bar tab or pay for the laundry before they brought it up to the room. Sutty, trying to make his, Francis’s, life a little easier. And maybe he was also trying to help a struggling young writer, like he had once been. Of course, he hadn’t struggled so desperately, so despairingly. Sutty had an income, in perpetuity, so there was no fear of starvation on the horizon. No sense of time running out. No one he loved and couldn’t live without. Sutty was a self-contained man of purpose who never seemed to have doubts, although they must have been there in the beginning. All writers have doubts about their ability. Francis knew that. All writers questioned their talent, convinced themselves they had none, and then convinced themselves equally that they had an abundance but nobody appreciated the fact and they would die in obscurity.
But Annabelle believed in him and that was what mattered, even when he didn’t believe in himself. Or did she? I’m a hopeless romantic, he thought. Nobody wanted him to be a writer, especially Annabelle. Not even Sutty. He was alone in this game — completely and utterly alone. There wasn’t another soul in the world who knew the kind of hopelessness he felt when he faced the wall of rejection and tried to scale it without any support, any assistance, any —
“Francis!” He heard his name being called and his mind snapped out of its downward spiralling reverie. At last! She was here, throwing herself into his arms. All was well. The world was set right again and he could breathe a sigh of relief. He could begin to write again.
Sutty breathed a sigh of relief, too, and gave a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods had granted his first wish. Annabelle had come. And what a lovely thing she is, he thought, She was small and slender, with a magnificent head of thick, auburn-coloured hair that reminded him of the sun setting in Somerset. Her skin was exquisitely pale and
