Mills and Boon

A Novella in Four Parts

By David Gardiner

This story may be reproduced in whole or in part for any non-commercial purpose provided that authorship is acknowledged and credited. The copyright remains the property of the author

1: The Parting of the Ways.

Colin wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about having a nervous breakdown. He knew people who claimed they had gone through one but he had never been in someone's company at the precise moment when it had happened. At least he imagined it must be a momentary event, like the cracking of the glass in the jewellery store display cabinet when you lean on it too hard. And perhaps in a similar manner followed by the deafening peel of alarm bells.

No, what was happening to him he decided was too lacking in drama. Too cold-blooded and methodical. He had broken no crockery and punched none of his colleagues in the nose, much as the idea now appealed to him. Neither had he collapsed into a helpless sobbing bundle on the office floor. He had merely walked to the bank instead of taking the Underground train to work and drawn out a large sum of money, as well as insisting that they converted everything remaining in his account into a single Banker's Draft that he could deposit in any financial institution anywhere in the world. There was also the joint account with his wife but he had left that alone: after all she was going to need something to get by on until she sorted out her finances. He had then returned to the cafe opposite his apartment block and waited until he saw his wife leave to visit her friend Alice, as she always did on Wednesday mornings. All that remained then was to pack all of his possessions that really meant anything to him, such as childhood photographs, favourite books and letters from old girlfriends, into a large suitcase, together with enough clothing and personal items to allow him to get by for the first few days.

Now he found himself quite relaxed, with his passport in the top pocket of his jacket, sitting back in his seat among the passengers on the Heathrow Airport express, pretending to take a polite interest in the raised concrete pillars carrying the A4 dual carriageway. None of what he had done seemed to him like the actions of a man whose mind had snapped, yet he was aware that some kind of mental limit had been reached and exceeded.

The basic mistake, he decided, the painful outcome of accepting the lie that the world foists on all of us, had been to suppose that he needed to live in the close company of other human beings. Nothing could be more alien to his basic nature. He was a person who needed solitude.

The animal kingdom furnished countless examples of creatures that exhibited the same basic need, and nobody thought any the less of them for being that way. They might come together with a mate to copulate two or three times a year and Colin also could see no particular objection to that, but as regards day-to-day living the need to please and to accommodate to the foibles of other people was simply oppressive to the point of intolerability.

He glanced at his fellow passengers on the train - earnest dark-suited businessmen, most of them, worrying themselves into early graves so that their wives and offspring could live in the right kind of house in the right fashionable London suburb and drive the right kind of car and go to the right schools and health clubs and get invited to the right dinner parties. Well, if that was sanity and normality he wasn't going to have any part of it, not anymore.

Colin got off at Terminal 4, knowing that most of the long-haul flights left from there, but without any clear notion of where he wanted to go. As he stepped off the train he said quietly to a man sitting by the doorway: "You're making yourself ill by working too much and you're going to die before your time. What are you getting in return? Think about it." The man looked at him as though he were completely insane. Colin didn't care. He felt it was something that needed to be said.

Pushing his case up the ramp at a leisurely pace, the trolley wheels squeaking rhythmically as he went, Colin continued to think about possible destinations. He wanted somewhere warm but not oppressively so, where English was spoken in at least some of the bars and restaurants, but not somewhere that had been set up for British tourism, with fish and chip shops and make-believe English pubs on every street corner. Somewhere far enough away that the chances of anybody ever recognizing him or knowing or caring who he was were minimal.

He stood with his trolley in the vast departure area beneath a line of TV screens while passengers flowed around his stationary figure hurrying to their check-in gates. He closed his eyes and visualized a world map centred on Britain. In his imagination he moved north - too cold. He moved south. Spain and Portugal - too British. Africa - too hot and too underdeveloped. West - Greenland and Iceland. Too cold. America and Canada Too much like where he was leaving. East - the eastern Mediterranean, Arabia, India, China, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia... yes, that was beginning to sound possible. A modest nest egg of Western money could buy a good lifestyle in South East Asia, and depending on where you went you could avoid the tourist trail. He wondered if the heat of the summer months would be unbearable but decided he could live high in the mountains if it was, or even have a summer residence and a winter residence like the Pope.

Glancing up at the screens he checked what South East Asian destinations were available in the next few hours. The choices seemed to be Manila, Vientiane, Bangkok, Ho Chi Min City or Kuala Lumpur. Of the five, Bangkok appealed to him the most. He dragged his case in the direction of the appropriate airline's sales desk.

ooOoo

It was early afternoon when Colin's wife Monica arrived back from her visit to Alice. They had eaten a leisurely lunch at the little Italian cocktail bar near Alice's flat in St. John's Wood, like they did most Wednesdays, and Monica had unburdened herself about last night's row with Colin. She was still ruminating about it now, wondering if she had been unreasonable, a little concerned that Colin had been so silent, not even bothering to defend himself or rise to her provocation. Was it the working out of some kind of natural law, she wondered, a point that every couple reached after three or four years of married life? She had seen a television programme once where they had suggested that three or four years was the natural lifespan of the human emotion of being in love. It was the time required to produce and to wean a human infant. Once that had been done there was no longer any biological advantage in the couple remaining together. The man had more to gain by sewing his next genetic seed elsewhere, and the woman's instincts would insure that she raised his child whether he was on the scene or not. In fact they did not have a child and Colin had made it abundantly clear that he had no desire for one. So much for the theory of men wanting to spread their DNA all over the place.

She washed the dishes that were still in the sink and put them away, then unable to muster the enthusiasm for any further housework, turned on the TV and flicked around to find a daytime soap. Just as she was beginning to feel settled the phone rang. She muted the TV sound and lifted the receiver.

"Mrs. Mills?"

"Yes?"

"It's Maisie at the office. I've been trying to reach you."

Monica looked down at the answering machine and saw to her embarrassment that the "message left" indicator was blinking urgently.

"Oh. Sorry. I've only just got in."

"Do you know if Mr. Mills will be coming in today?"

"Isn't he there?"

"No Mrs. Mills. And I'm afraid he's missed rather an important client meeting now."

"But he left at the usual time... he must be delayed on the Underground."

"It's one forty, Mrs. Mills."

She held the instrument for a few moments without saying anything, then replaced it in its cradle. Slowly, like someone in a trance, she stood up and made her way to the door of the bedroom and looked in. One glance was enough. She returned to where she had been sitting and sank into the chair. On the TV screen people silently yelled at one another and slammed doors and swept ornaments off shelves to shatter on the floor.

Last night she had been a young married woman, like so many others, with things to sort out but still coping, dealing with things, asserting herself. Now she was that walking cliché, the woman whose husband had left her.

She felt numb, uncomprehending. Yes, they had rowed last night, but not for the first time and not especially seriously. If he had reached the point where he just wanted to give up why hadn't he said anything? How could he just stand up and walk away from a three and a half year marriage? A good marriage, for most of the time. Didn't the life they had had together mean anything to him at all?

Suddenly anger welled up. He was doing this to make her feel guilty. She was supposed to come crawling after him and apologize. He would be at Stanley's or at his mother's house. Well, it wasn't going to work. She was doing no crawling whatsoever. She could wait him out and that was just what she was going to do. A little bit of peace and quiet might be good for her. A bit of time for herself, to think about her own needs.

Suddenly she began to cry uncontrollably.

2: Thai Noon.

Colin sat out on his veranda and watched the lizard that lived under the steps chasing flies in the late morning sun. Beyond the little garden with its orchids, lotus pond and clump of immature coconut palms, the banana plantation, neatly cultivated in rows and criss-crossed by life-sustaining irrigation channels and rough gravel access roads, sloped down to the coast and the gaily coloured houses of Phan Nom fishing village. A few labourers, naked to the waist and wearing conical Vietnamese-style sun hats strolled around tying off the leaves and pruning away the unproductive stumps of previous harvests. Dotted around the plantation small windmills rotated lazily, pumping the precious irrigation water towards the reservoir at the top of the hill. Out in the bay he could see a couple of traditional square-rigged Thai junks moving sedately on their way, and the pattern of horizontal marker buoys in perfect straight lines that indicated the position of the marine fish farm's holding nets. Nearer in to shore he could see the huge concrete tanks where they bred the tiger prawns and shellfish for the tables of the five-star Bangkok hotels.

Behind him in the kitchen Ranee, his housemaid, had started preparing the rice for the midday meal, washing it repeatedly in the water that flowed (to her initial delight and amazement) in unlimited quantities from the crude copper tap in the kitchen. It had taken Colin some time and patience to persuade her to stop lighting wood fires in the garden and use the indoor butane powered gas rings for her cooking, but she had learned well and now was highly possessive about her high-tech appliances and proud to hold a position in the household of Phan Nom's only rich foreigner.

Now that his initial settling in period was at an end, Colin was somewhat thrown back on his own resources. His day was gloriously unstructured, at least outside of harvesting time, when it could become a little bit hectic, but by comparison with his life in London even that was very small beer. He had indeed gone from one extreme to the other. Nobody made the least demand on him, beyond payment for goods supplied or services rendered. He could get up at any time of the day he wanted to and employ his time exactly as he saw fit. The plantation almost managed itself. He had good experienced overseers who made sure nothing went wrong and everything got attended to in time. They cared more about the business than he did: to him it was an investment, to them a way of life. This was what he had wanted, what he had so carefully and deliberately set up for himself. This was freedom.

As the years had gone by a daily ritual had emerged. He would get up, wash and dress, make himself a cup of coffee, and sit out in one of the wicker chairs on the veranda to drink it. This was his thinking time. Sometimes it might extend all the way to lunchtime, as it had today, sometimes he would take a walk through the banana fields coming up to noon to exchange a few words with the workers. He had learned some simple Thai phrases and he knew all of their names and would greet them individually and compliment them on the standard of their work. One thing that seven years of toil at Granville Promotions had taught him was that people worked harder if you praised them. One minute's personal contact and a word of encouragement each day was worth, he estimated, the annual equivalent of a 15% pay increase. After lunch he would answer his correspondence and maybe drive in to town or visit with one of the small circle of British and American expatriates like himself whom he had discovered hiding in the surrounding villages and countryside. English speakers abroad coalesce like iron filings on the pole of a magnet.

Few of them were of his own generation, they had mostly come to Thailand to retire, and back home he would have had little time for them he knew, but here there was an unbreakable bond that held them all together.

In the evenings he would come home and watch the American TV channels beamed in to his satellite dish or read a book or even do a little bit more of that thinking.

What was slowly emerging from his meditations was that he had been running from things, not to anything. He had detested the morning grind of the London traffic, the feel and the smell of the hot human bodies crushed together on the Underground train, the petty scoldings for coming in late, the bad tempered memos about forms not properly filled-in or unauthorised use of the photo-copier, the mean-spirited questioning of every expense claim that he submitted, the reprimands from Mr. Prentiss for sales that hadn't been closed properly or leads that hadn't been followed up, the whole climate of negativity and blame and cut-throat competition for commission and advancement. Then home to a bad-tempered wife who wanted children but not sex and a growing pile of final demands for things that he didn't know they had bought and certainly didn't need. A generalized feeling of inadequacy and worthlessness, of having failed to come up to the mark career-wise, maritally or socially.

The last straw, he now realized, had been his wife's accusing him of not having any friends. It was true, in a way, that his only real friends were school and college contacts that he saw maybe once or twice a year, but he had business acquaintances, dozens of them, and networking was one of the few things that everybody at work agreed he was good at.

But the point was, he told himself, drawing it all together, everything he had done had sprung from the urge to escape, it's motivation had been framed entirely in the negative. Now the time had come to ask himself where it was that he was journeying to, what he wanted out of his life. As he reached this conclusion the lizard pounced on an unsuspecting brown beetle and swallowed it in one gulp, turning instantly to Colin, seemingly asking him for approval. "Well done little lizard," Colin commended it, "you knew what you wanted and you went and got it. You're two steps ahead of me." Colin's predicament reminded him of a question asked by a visiting alien in a Kurt Vonnegut novel: What are people for? It had stumped the characters in the book and Colin feared that it might defeat him as well.

ooOoo

After she got over the initial shock of Colin's disappearance, and the further blows of discovering that he was not at Stanley's or his mother's house and had withdrawn a considerable sum of money to which she as his spouse probably had some rights in law, Monica managed to pull the frayed threads of her life together with a speed and efficiency that surprised even herself. She offered to help out at Colin's office until they found somebody else, and within a few short weeks had become so indispensable to the running of the place that she was asked to stay on and almost invited to name her own salary.

Where Colin had found his selling role a burden and a continual embarrassment Monica discovered that she thrived on it, relishing the psychological duel by which clients were seduced into parting with their money. She developed her own highly successful selling technique and soon became the Company's representative of choice to negotiate all their more important contracts. Fearing that she might be head-hunted by competitors, the Company increased Monica's salary annually by a dizzy percentage, and promoted her at the earliest opportunity to head their sales team.

In the blossoming of her new career Monica found a previously unimagined fulfilment. She no longer thought about husbands, past or future, or about children, but only about sales figures and projections and the monthly performances of her staff. People who knew her said that she had changed, that she had become cooler and more self-sufficient and even, if they were being very honest, a little hard.

Monica stopped going to see Alice on Wednesdays: for one thing she was seldom free in the middle of the day to go traipsing over to St. John's Wood, but more to the point she had begun to find her old housewifely friends boring, and glazed over completely when they started to talk about their babies and whether they were crawling or standing up or had uttered their first word. Inevitably many of her friends drifted away.

She hired a woman to do her housework and cleaning for a while, then decided that the flat she was living in was unnecessarily big for a single career woman and sold it in favour of a studio flat in the Barbican which was within walking distance of the office and small enough for her to manage comfortably on her own.

Monica's parents and her oldest friends were left gasping at the pace of change in her life. The old dissatisfied, hurting, slightly depressive Monica had metamorphosed into dynamic, fast-moving, high-powered, shoulder-padded glass-ceiling piercing Executive Monica. Someone had traded in the Barbie doll for the new female version of Action Man. Those closest to her looked on in awe, hoping for the best but troubled by the niggling suspicion that it might still end in tears.

3: The Meaning of Life.

Colin's meditations continued for the remainder of that Cool Season at Phan Nom, his Homeric search for fulfilment leading him up a number of blind alleys. He decided to do some voluntary work at the orphanage in the next village but found that his total ignorance of the needs of children and near-total ignorance of the Thai language made him little more than a visiting curiosity. What they really needed was a little of his money, not his personal presence.

He tried both writing and painting but found that he had little talent for either, then enrolled for a course in Political Science at an American distance learning college. Politics, he discovered, was exactly the same as business. Both were elegantly modelled by the board game Monopoly. The aim was for each player to accumulate as much land and wealth as he or she possibly could regardless of the consequences for any other player and regardless of any considerations of morality or natural justice. He abandoned Political Science in disgust.

With regard to lifestyles Colin seemed to have two alternatives left to him, neither of which in the abstract appealed to him all that much. There was the life of pleasure and sensuality, as represented by the bright lights of Pattaya and Bangkok's streets of sin, and the life of contemplation and self-perfection as represented by the towering conical silver chedi that rose heavenwards from the roof of the local Buddhist temple. Employing a logic that he could not quite explain to himself Colin decided that he should sample the delights of the flesh first and keep the comforts of the meditative life in reserve in case these should prove disappointing. He arranged for Ranee to look after the house for a few days and purchased a return ticket for the twice-daily air-conditioned coach to Bangkok.

As he left, responding to a passing whim, he asked Ranee if she would be willing to sleep with him for money. "Three hundred baht, one night," she replied without a moment's hesitation. Mildly surprised at her lack of embarrassment (and mentally noting her charges as an indication of the going rate) he thanked her, said that he would keep it in mind, and strolled down the hill towards the coach station.

ooOoo

Monica's rocket-like ascent into the stratosphere of the business world had kept her entirely occupied for more than half a decade of her life, until the looming of her mid thirties brought with it those nagging little doubts that she had so despised in others. Clichés like "biological clock" entered her thoughts and she began pausing for an unconscionable length of time outside the windows of Mothercare.

She had by now accumulated savings almost worthy of the term "personal fortune", having invested wisely while the interest rates were still high, and the question of just what she was going to spend it on was now presenting itself on her with some force. She sat alone at her desk in her fashionable new Barbican studio flat and toyed with the mouse wheel on her laptop computer while an ever-changing star field screensaver lulled her into a mood of self analysis and introspection.

There didn't seem a great deal of point in dying alone with a healthy bank balance. The point of saving was surely to pass it on, in cash or in kind, to another generation of your own family. She had nieces and nephews of course but that wasn't the same. Other people had families, proper families of their own, and they cared about those families more than anything else in the world. What did she care about, she asked herself? It was a staggeringly difficult question.

Money? No, she had no real feeling for money, it just sat there in her bank account or her shares portfolio: she enjoyed the cut and thrust of earning it but had become strangely indifferent to spending it. Just knowing that it was there gave her no particular pleasure either. Money, she had come to realize, only matters to you when you don't have very much of it. When it is no longer a scarce resource it becomes uninteresting, like tap water or the floorboards you walk on.

Work itself? Was that important to her? Not really, she admitted to herself. It was an amusing diversion, like a crossword puzzle or a game of solitaire, but it wasn't the kind of thing a person could actually care about, invest in emotionally. Why? Because it was at rock bottom so completely inconsequential. Some people were successful, some people weren't. Some businesses flourished, some went under. One failed that another might succeed. It made no real difference which was which: often it was a matter of pure luck or factors far beyond anyone's control. In the great scheme of things, she knew perfectly well, it meant nothing. She envied creative artists, what they did must be almost like... giving birth!

It wasn't that Monica had undergone her second great transition at that precise instant, it was something that had been gathering strength for a long time before, but this was the moment at which she finally admitted it to herself and accepted it for what it was. And with the insight came a deep pain. A life that had for a time seemed overflowing with reward suddenly seemed empty and pointless. She found her thoughts being pulled back to the old days with Colin in the big flat in the northern suburbs. In her imagination the life she had known then assumed a warm pink glow. She deleted from her memory the arguments and the whole days that had passed without a word being exchanged between them and the cruel late-night explosions of bottled-up anger and frustration, and remembered only the early days when the two of them had been so much in love, when she could hardly wait for him to get home to her arms, when they would make love in the early evening on the sitting-room floor or the sofa in front of the coal-effect gas fire. When they talked excitedly all night long about the things they were going to do and the lives they were going to have together. When they slept curled up in each other's arms, her head nestling blissfully beneath his shoulder, their legs gently intertwined...

Since Colin had been Monica's only lover it was natural that she should think of him when the notion of resurrecting that area of her life occurred to her once again. The more practical part of her knew that it was dangerous to try to recreate the past and that disappointment was the most likely outcome, but her romantic nature which had unquestionably gained the upper hand at this particular moment urged her to make the necessary effort to trace him. Having become a lot more resourceful since those North London days Monica came up with the germ of an idea of how she might find him straight away. He had converted the money that he took with him into a Banker's Draft, and there would be a record at the issuing bank of where that draft had been lodged. Such information was strictly confidential of course but then so was ninety per cent of the financial information that she routinely collected about her clients. She was pretty certain that one or another of her contacts in the banking world would be able to tell her to a good degree of approximation where her flown bird had come to roost.

Monica was not so foolish as to assume that Colin would automatically want to come back, or even that she would feel any attraction herself when she saw him again after the passage of all these years, but her instincts told her that she should at least give herself the chance of a meeting and of putting her intuition, however insane it might be, to the test.

ooOoo

On the narrow crowded street, buzzing with the sound and light of a thousand brash hostess bars, semi naked young women stood around in giggling clusters, trying to entice foreign male tourists to accompany them inside, employing all their female wiles, as well as handing out cards proclaiming that "Your second drink is free" or telling of live sex shows or "Show with Girl and Snake, Both Very Dangerous". In the lurid neon glare that was striving to turn midnight into noon, three-wheeled "tuc-tuc" taxis ambled by, discharging their steady stream of yet more male tourists into the warm tropical night air, while little girls with baskets of wild flowers strolled among the carousers requesting the men to buy their wares as gifts for their female companions, or the bar girls to buy them as offerings for their establishment's spirit house. A boy with a cloth bag containing live lizards plied his lonely trade from bar to bar offering the owners his environmentally friendly solution to the mosquito problem. Foreign men and Thai women laughed and embraced and hailed taxis to take them to hotels and short-stay establishments nearby where they might become better acquainted.

There was a reassuring lack of sophistication about the ramshackle go-go bar where Colin sat and nursed his bottle of chilled Singha beer in its cork-insulated jacket. Three shapely and graceful Thai girls in their late teens performed their own interpretation of erotic dancing on a small raised platform to one side of the bar, occasionally wrapping themselves in provocative poses around the silver pillars that ran from the platform surface to the ceiling. Coloured lights illuminated them in a regular sequence as they danced, flooding their bodies in a different hue approximately every five seconds. This sequence was totally independent of the music, which consisted of a succession of ten or fifteen-year-old pop songs playing from worn tape cassettes at a volume that did not impede the flow of conversation. The girls wore matching white miniskirts and bikini tops, which were the uniform of this particular establishment, and did not exert themselves unduly in their dancing or give the activity more than cursory attention. Each of them wore a red plastic badge on her bikini top bearing a number for ease of reference. As they swayed and wriggled sensuously their eyes were on the customers, clearly assessing and discussing likely prospects for the night or the idiosyncrasies of those they had already entertained, or simply exchanging gossip in a casual and light-hearted conversation, which, like the music, never stopped.

All around the room similarly attired bar girls sat with the exclusively male customers, daintily playing with glasses of Thai whisky and Coca Cola mixer purchased for them at inflated prices by the customers receiving their attention. In some cases this attention extended to an embrace or a lingering kiss, or sitting on the gentleman's lap to facilitate mutual anatomical investigations.

Colin had been joined by an attractive young hostess, No.16 for reference purposes, immediately he had entered the bar. She sat next to him now, her high-back bar-stool pushed as close to his as it would go, one hand cradling her drink, the other affectionately covering his where she had placed it on her knee.

"Tell me," he said with deep seriousness, "you work here because you need the money, right?"

"Everybody need money, Mr. Colin."

"Agreed. But answer me this. Would you do it if money wasn't really a problem? If you had as much of it as you needed? You see the reason I ask is that most of humanity never has enough to meet their basic needs. But when you do have enough, and all those basic needs are met, what should you do next? What is human life for, when you've got past that initial hurdle?"

The young girl looked puzzled, as well she might, but decided to have a go at the question. "If I have lots money then I be mamasan, start my own bar."

"But why? Why would you want to work if you had all the money you needed?"

"I like bar. Bar good. I have good friends, same like sisters, all work in bar."

Colin nodded thoughtfully. "You mean, this is the only life you know? You can't imagine anything else?"

"No, I work before this on coconut plantation, north of Ayutthaya. I climb trees, get coconuts down for my uncle. Then uncle get monkey, very clever, very fast, not need me any more."

"You were made redundant by a monkey?"

"Not ordinary monkey, very clever monkey. Cost three thousand baht."

Colin considered this. "I can see the logic of your position. You have chosen a profession where you are very unlikely to be replaced by a member of another species."

"Lots of girls do other things, go other places. Usually come back again. Some girls, good friends, they marry man England, man America, man Germany. Go to foreign country, have no friends, eat strange food, get very cold, not feel good. All come back, work bars again."

"I see. So the point of it all for you is to be with your friends, and close to your family. In a familiar setting, where you feel you belong. Right?"

"Yes. And meet foreign men, buy me nice things, give me lots of money."

"So you actually like what you do? You're happy with your life?"

"Of course. Very happy. Why not? You want fuck me now? Only five hundred baht, stay all night."

"Well, now that you mention it," he squeezed her hand affectionately, "I do seem to be in quite a... romantic mood."

4: Monica's Quest.

Monica hadn't come prepared for the merciless heat of Bangkok. Before registering at her hotel she got the taxi driver to take her to one of the big air conditioned shopping malls where she bought half a dozen of the thinnest summer tops she could find and a couple of long billowing 1960s style multi-coloured skirts - the kind of thing she wouldn't have worn for a bet in London.

When she had checked in, washed and changed she phoned the bank where Colin had lodged his money and made an appointment to see the manager that same afternoon. Her familiarity with the ways of ASEAN financial institutions gave her confidence that her Company's calling card and the ten thousand baht in the brown envelope in her purse would allow the manager to see his way clear to providing the information that she was looking for.

She enjoyed an excellent lunch in one of the hotel's lavish restaurants, then, feeling adventurous, sprayed herself with sun-shield and mosquito-repellent and set out to walk the half mile or so to keep her appointment with Khun Saropsit Boon Tantasucharit, the manager of the central Bangkok branch of the Allied Asian Banking Corporation.

Stepping outside the elegant marble lobby the noon heat of Bangkok hit her like a blast from the door of a baker's oven. Within minutes she felt the perspiration seeping from the soft skin above her ears and around the base of her neck. How could anybody live in this heat and humidity, she asked herself. But within a very few more minutes her body had somehow adapted and she was able to give her attention to the bazaar scene through which she was walking.

Traffic screeched down Rama Four Road, horns sounding almost continuously in a happy cacophony, the tuc-tucs weaving in and out between the slower moving cars and trucks, negotiating impossibly narrow gaps, frequently lifting one of their two rear wheels inches clear of the road as they hurled their alarmed passengers against the sides of the vehicle in their frenzy to convey their cargo of tourists to some tranquil temple or sedate boat ride. On the pavement local people and tourists mingled in a colourful slow-moving river of humanity, shoulders gently brushing as they passed each other by, filling the exact width of the broad pavement with an unaccountable precision. Monica's hopes of ever finding Colin in this ocean of busy humanity seemed to diminish with every step.

At the bank Monica was treated with all the exaggerated respect she had anticipated. She was asked to wait for a few moments, led to a genuine leather upholstered sofa in an elegantly furnished anteroom and offered her choice of drink. She chose a cold Coca Cola, which seemed to please the young Thai secretary, who arrived back moments later with a tall glass of the beverage containing dainty spherical pieces of ice and a twist of lemon elegantly perched on its rim. On the heavy carved teak door of the manager's office a polished brass plaque bore the words: Khun Boon, Manager. Monica reasoned that the full version of his name would have covered up too much of the woodwork.

While she sipped her drink a shady-looking olive skinned gentleman in a dark suit and even darker sunglasses emerged from the office carrying a large black briefcase, nodded in her direction and left through the outer door. His appearance added to her confidence that Khun Boon was going to be amenable to persuasion. After a momentary pause the door opened again and the manager himself emerged to greet her. He was taller and younger than she had expected, a debonair, cultured looking man in a superbly tailored blue serge suit and coordinating tie and shirt. He reached out a hand, and as he gently helped her from the soft enveloping leather he fixed her with a smile that would have done credit to a leading man in an Oriental romance movie. "Ms. Mills," he said in a highly cultured English accent, paying special heed to the correct pronunciation of her maritally neutral title, "I am most delighted to meet you. Please step inside."

Holding her hand for a fraction of a second longer than was strictly necessary he led her into the adjacent room where he steadied the chair as she sat down opposite his large but uncluttered polished teak desk. He took his seat behind it and beamed his seductive smile in her direction. Monica wondered if, in the circumstances, she even needed to part with the brown envelope, but decided on balance not to push her luck.

Khun Boon, who never broke eye contact as they spoke, proved more than helpful. Having accepted her "small contribution to offset any administrative costs that might be involved in locating the information" (without even opening it to see what was inside) he provided her with a print-out of Colin's full local address, telephone number, bank balance, last one hundred transactions; and for good measure a list of his current investments together with their most recent quotations on Wall Street and the Hang Seng, and a summary of his previous investment history going back to his arrival in the country. Monica noticed that the print-out was on plain white paper and that neither the Bank's name nor its logo appeared anywhere. The information filled so many sheets that he thoughtfully provided her with a small plastic carrier bag in which to transport them back to her hotel.

As she thanked him profusely and rose to go he motioned her to wait and, with some awkwardness, asked if she would like to meet him again, on a social basis. Perhaps she would like him to show her some of the sights and explain some of the fascinating history of Thailand's capital. Flattered and more than a little surprised she politely refused and thanked him again for his time. He insisted on seeing her to the door and gave her hand another lingering squeeze before he allowed her to leave. Monica's ego received an enormous boost from the encounter and she floated down Rama Four Road towards her hotel convinced that the gods were smiling on her venture and a happy outcome was close to a certainty.

Back in her hotel room Monica took off her shoes, sat down, and studied the sheets of paper that Khun Boon had provided. She was mildly impressed with the way that Colin had managed the fairly modest sum that he had taken with him when he made his getaway. He had not been extravagant, living on the interest of a few shrewd investments for the first couple of years, and had moved out of Internet stock at exactly the right time, buying the plantation with his earnings. This venture seemed to be returning impressive if somewhat erratic profits. There were a couple of moves that he had made which she could have warned him against but overall it was a sound and sensible portfolio. She carried the top sheet with Colin's personal details over to the bedside telephone and asked for an outside line. Her heart beginning to pound a little, she dialled his number.

A woman's voice answered in the Thai language. Slightly disappointed, Monica asked her if she spoke English. "Speak English very good," her respondent answered proudly. Monica smiled and relaxed a little. She asked to speak to Colin.

"Mr. Colin not here at the moment," the woman on the phone explained, a little more loudly than was strictly necessary, "Mr. Colin go to Bangkok."

Monica brightened up. "Oh. Really? I'm in Bangkok. Are you... Mrs. Colin?" She waited tensely for an answer. It was the one she was hoping for.

"No Mrs. Colin. Only Mr. Colin. Him in Bangkok now, maybe find lady there, maybe make her Mrs. Colin."

Monica was a little surprised at the intimate nature of the information that Colin's housekeeper, if that was what she was, was willing to give out to a complete stranger on the phone. She had yet to learn that in Thailand the concept of personal privacy was largely absent. "Do you know where Mr. Colin is staying in Bangkok?" she asked as casually as she could.

"Mr. Colin leave me telephone number, you want?"

"Yes please. If it's not too much trouble." She took a pen from her purse and wrote the number down as Ranee dictated it.

"Thank you so much. You've been most helpful."

"You're wrong," she said aloud after she had put the phone down, "there is a Mrs. Colin."

She lifted the receiver again and dialled another number. "Nana Plaza Guest House?" a female voice answered in perfect English.

"Good afternoon. I wonder if you could tell me your exact address and how to get there?"

ooOoo

Monica sat alone and waited at a table for two beneath the woven banana-leaf canopy of the outdoor cafe opposite the entrance of the Nana Plaza Guest House. The square was an untidy clutter of open-air bars and restaurants fringed by market stalls and food wagons selling such items as delicious-smelling barbecued chicken, spring rolls, fried rice and the ubiquitous cans of Coca Cola half submerged in ice-buckets. The predominantly male tourists strolled about or sat drinking, many of them in the company of strikingly glamorous young Thai women with whom they appeared to be deep in conversation, or in some cases reluctantly parting company. As an unaccompanied Western woman of comparatively mature years Monica felt thoroughly out of place. The off-duty bar girls smiled at her as they drifted past, cruising the square for unaccompanied men or chatting pleasantly among themselves on their way home from another working night.

She was on her third cup of coffee, and beginning to worry that she might be seen as an interloper on the girls' patch, when an older, slimmer and much more suntanned version of Colin emerged from the front entrance of the Nana Plaza Guest House, arm in arm with a very young and strikingly attractive Thai bar girl. She was wearing a multi-coloured flowing lacy skirt of the exact pattern that Monica had bought for herself earlier in the day (although hers was probably two sizes smaller) and a completely see-through blue tie-up top that concealed nothing whatever. Monica had to admit that she looked stunning "But could she run a sales department?" she whispered to herself, standing up to follow them. Somehow it didn't sound like a clinching argument.

Monica kept a discreet few paces behind the chatting couple, near enough to hear what they were saying but too far back to be noticed, she judged, especially by two people as wrapped up in one another as these.

"It's a banana plantation, Soti," he was telling her, "on the side of a hill, overlooking Phan Nom on the Trat Province coast. You can get there in two hours on the air-conditioned coach."

"I have uncle and two aunts, live Trat Province."

"The house is at the top of the hill. It's teak framed but it's modern. I've got mains water and electricity, and a satellite dish. No air conditioning yet, but you can have it if you want it..." Monica's spirits began to sink.

"I not care. Fan okay, no problem."

"Oh, and you won't have to do any cooking or housekeeping. I've got a woman who comes in, and I wouldn't want her to lose her job. And I don't mind if you want to visit your family a lot - or your friends here. Half the trouble with marriage is that couples see too much of each other. That the two people don't have any space for themselves. I don't want it to be like that"

"You very good man, Mr. Colin." She stopped and gently guided his head down for a kiss. Monica stopped also and turned away in embarrassment. "I so lucky find you. I be very happy when I Mrs. Colin."

"Mrs. Mills, Soti," he corrected her gently, "you're going to be Mrs. Mills. Although there is a small problem connected with that... "

As they walked on, Colin's arm around her waist, Monica stayed where she was on the pavement. Their voices gradually faded out. The last thing she heard Colin say was: "It was either you or the Buddhist monks, and so help me you've got them beat..."

Feeling totally empty and numb Monica turned and walked slowly towards a parked taxi. She gave the driver the name of her hotel and without even bothering to haggle over the fare let herself in to the back. As they pulled away a couple with two young daughters in a double pushchair passed them on the pavement. The husband was Western and relatively old, his Thai wife young, attractive and lively - a picture of what Soti would be in ten year's time. The two toddlers were totally enchanting, like the children Deborah Kerr had looked after in The King and I: pale skin, high cheekbones, perfectly straight silky black hair and bright alert almond eyes taking in every detail of what was going on around them. It was the sight of the children more than anything else that, for the first time in almost a decade, brought the tears to Monica's eyes.

Monica was a little more composed by the time she arrived back at her hotel. What she was feeling now was a physical and emotional exhaustion out of all proportion to what recent events seemed to justify. She slumped into the first chair that she came to in the marble lobby and let her thoughts churn relentlessly on. She could have coped easily, she told herself, with the discovery that he had remarried or formed a new stable relationship of some kind, but to have missed her chance by a single day after all these years was a blow of fate more cruel than she deserved. How had she offended the gods that they should treat her in such as shoddy way?

Well, there was no point in bitterness. She would send them a divorce as a wedding present. Maybe he would be happy with Soti, maybe she would be happy with him, who could tell? Their mistake, all those years ago, had been to expect too much of each other, and of marriage itself. Perhaps Colin had learned this lesson. Certainly she had.

"Mrs. Mills," came a woman's voice from very nearby. She started and looked up. It was the young hotel receptionist, who, despite her respectable blue uniform, brought to mind immediately Colin's new fiancée. "You have a message."

"Me? Surely not?"

"Yes, Mrs. Mills. It is addressed to you." With these words the girl handed her a large loosely sealed pink envelope which was indeed addressed to "Ms. Mills" and returned to her desk. Intrigued, Monica took out the neatly handwritten sheet and started to read.

My Dear Ms. Mills (may I call you Monica?),

When we met this morning I noticed that you have the same second name as the gentleman you were attempting to trace. This suggested to me that your interest in Mr. Mills might be personal rather than professional.

I hope you will forgive me that I took the liberty of following you for the rest of the afternoon. I was a witness to the unfortunate exchange between your former husband and his young companion of last night.

Please let me explain to you that it has long been my dream to meet a beautiful woman from England, the country where I received my University education, with an understanding of the financial world and a willingness to form a friendship with a humble Thai bachelor such as myself, and perhaps eventually to discuss the possibility of a future together should our aims in life coincide.

If you would be so kind as to reconsider my offer to show you some of the sights of this beautiful city we might explore in a leisurely fashion the possibility of such an initial friendship.

You may contact me immediately should you so wish - in the chair opposite yours.

Your humble and devoted servant,

Saropsit Boon Tantasucharit.

"The golden Buddha," he began expansively, taking her hand as though he had known her all his life, "is the largest single golden object in the world. It has been venerated for longer than the entire history of Western civilization. Allow me to tell you all about it in the taxi..."

TO READ OR SIGN THE GUEST BOOK JUST CLICK ON THE
OPEN BOOK ICON BELOW!

Top of Page

Back to First Page