Suddenly at Singapore Read Online Free PDF

had been going to walk like that, on a clear road, in the sun.

CHAPTER III
    S YLVIA F LORES had been my secretary for twelve years and I still called her Miss. It was that kind of impeccable relation, which had matured, but in which the partitions were still high. She was thirty-eight and unmarried, with faint traces of that brief flowering of looks which might have even been beauty. At twenty-six, when she first came into our office, the best had somehow gone, you felt you would have liked to have seen her at nineteen. Her father had been more Portuguese than Chinese and her mother was more English than South Indian.
    Mrs. Susannah Flores, to whom I took a Christmas present every year, had been ailing for as long as I could remember, looked after with great devotion by her only daughter, and I tried at least once a week to ask after Mrs. Flores’s arthritis which was never any better because, as the daughter explained, the damp heat of Singapore was the worst possible climate for this complaint. Mrs. Flores wanted to get “home” and it had long ago been made clear to me that this was England.
    Miss Flores was extremely sensitive and three days after my brother’s death her face still bore the traces of shock, as if the lines of this were scored on and could only be expected to fade slowly. Miss Flores had herself spoken to me of time as the great healer.
    I dictated to her whenever possible and time permitted and she would on occasion correct my grammar. She sat still in a posture that had been taught as correct at her commercial school, very upright in a stiff chair, her pad on her knees, and taking shorthand with a pencil, not a pen.
    “The Kubat Palm Oil Company,” she read back, “23 Sundarah Road, Surabaya, Java. Dear Sir …”
    I went on with the letter, slowly. I had swung my chair around and sat looking out through huge windows to Singapore roads. It was a view that had always excited me, the little ships and the big, the little ones more interesting. They lay at anchor over an arc of two miles, their variety infinite, their purposes when they left here sometimes strange and even melodramatic. On many a morning Jeff and I had been able to look out and see our own ships resting there, two, three and sometimes four.
    Miss Flores was waiting for me with a look.
    “Yes?”
    “I wonder about that sentence, Mr. Harris. Do you mean to suggest here that they make their claim for damages to insurance only after further consultation with us?”
    “No. Let them go to the insurance company right away.”
    “I can make that stronger then?”
    “You can indeed.”
    She took a little time off to make it stronger, dabbing down the words. I was vaguely conscious of her disapproval. She didn’t like me looking at the view during business hours.
    The phone rang. She took it.
    “Harris and Company here. Mr. Paul Harris’s office.”
    She frowned.
    “I can’t seem to make any sense of this. Someone did ask for you.”
    I took the receiver.
    “Paul Harris here.”
    I heard distinctly an indrawn breath, as though the man at the other end had the mouthpiece pressed against his lips.
    “Kuantan,” a voice said. “Kuantan.”
    There was a kind of hoarse, almost rasping urgency in that voice. Then the line clicked.
    “Must be a wrong number, Miss Flores.”
    She reached for the receiver, but I put it back on its hook as though I hadn’t seen her hand coming out. She disapproved.
    “Is that all?”
    “Yes, for this morning.”
    The pad was fitted into a little case with the pencil. Miss Flores stood and moved towards the door. Then she halted.
    “Mr. Harris, forgive me saying this. But I think it’s wonderful. We all do. I mean the way you … the way you’re carrying on as though that was the thing to do.”
    I felt a funny little glow of warmth towards her.
    “It’s the only thing I can see to do, Miss Flores. But thank you. You’ve all been a great help, too, you know.”
    “It’s like … a presence gone,