War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk Page B

should he care, since he believes it?”
    The planes were dwindling in the distance. Pamela sipped her drink, peering fore and aft along the gigantic deck. “You know, Phil, Captain Henry visited this ship when it brought Churchill to Newfoundland. Now we walk its deck off Malaya, and he’s commanding a monster like this in Hawaii. Unreal.”
    “Rather on your mind still, your Yankee captain?”
    “That’s why I’m here. Pearl Harbor’s my destination. Talky knows that.”
    Rule grimaced and pulled at his mustache. “Look, I’m staying at the home of Jeff McMahon, the head of the Malayan Broadcasting System. Let’s all go to dinner at Raffles tonight, shall we? Jeff wants to meet your father and put him on the air. Talky will like Elsa. She’s the most beautiful woman in Singapore.”
    “Then her husband’s a fool to have you in the house.”
    “Why, darling, I don’t abuse a man’s hospitality.” Pamela’s response was an arched eyebrow and a contemptuously wrinkled mouth. “You’ll come to dinner, then?”
    “I don’t mind. I can’t speak for Talky.”
    Later the fat old correspondent, in the highest spirits, readily agreed to dine with Singapore’s most beautiful woman. “Of course, dear boy. Smashing. I say, the air chief marshal’s a brick. I’m to visit the most secret military installations here. Not one door closed. And I’m to write what I bloody well please.”
    Elsa McMahon wore clinging ivory silk jersey, the only modish dress Pamela had yet seen in the colony. Her heavy glossy black hair might have been done in Paris. Four children milled and clattered about the rambling house, pursued by scolding servants; but the woman had a willowy figure, a cameo face, and the clear smooth skin of a girl, tanned to a rosy amber by tennis. She showed Pamela her house, her books, a whole wall of phonograph records, and before the sunset failed, her tennis court and the garden: a big disorderly expanse of lawn, high palms, flowering bushes and trees — gardenias, hibiscus, jasmine, and jacaranda —in air almost chokingly perfumed. Her easy English had a Scandinavian lilt, for her father had been a Norwegian sea captain. Her husband kept eyeing her as though they had been married a month.
    They were killing time over drinks, waiting for Tudsbury to get away from an interview with the governor, when he rang up. The governor had just asked him to dine at the Tanglin Club. He was at the club now. Would Pamela and her friends forgive him, and join them, at the governor’s invitation, for a drink?
    Rule said testily, as Pam still held the phone, “Pamela, that’s damned rude of him. Our dinner was all set. Tell him and that pompous-ass governor they can both go to hell.”
    “Nonsense, he can’t turn down the governor,” said Jeff McMahon amiably. “The Tanglin Club’s on our way. Let’s go.”
    It was a short drive from the McMahon house. Pulling to a stop at the club entrance, the director of the Malayan Broadcasting System turned to Pamela. “Here you are. Elsa and I will buzz on to the Raffles bar. Don’t hurry for dinner. The music goes on till midnight.”
    “Nonsense. Park the car and come on in. The governor invited all of us.”
    “I resigned from the Tanglin, Pam, when I married Elsa.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    Elsa McMahon in the front seat turned her head. The dark eyes were solemn, the lovely mouth taut with irony. “My mother was Burmese, dear. See you at the Raffles.”
    The Tanglin was spacious, sprawling, and stuffy. Full-length court portraits of the king and queen dominated the foyer; London magazines and newspapers were scattered about; and under the slow-turning fans, the everlasting white-coated colored boys hustled with drinks. A bibulous and strident noise filled the club, for the evening was well along. Tudsbury sat at the bar amid the same people Pamela had seen aboard the
Prince of Wales.
The men were getting quite drunk. The women’s evening dresses were as