by Janet Tanner
Alex and Su Ming went to the room they called ‘the school’ in order to continue his reading lessons and Elise went upstairs to make a final check of the two cases she had decided would be all they could take. Alex’s things were in apple-pie order; she managed to push them down sufficiently to fit in his favourite teddy bear.
But when she came to pack her own toilet articles, she discovered that one or two items were almost finished. With no idea what shopping facilities there might be in Australia, it was a little disconcerting to be without supplies of essential items, so she decided to spare a half-hour to go down to the stores in town. There was plenty of time to kill between now and noon – too much, in fact! A walk to the shops would create a welcome diversion.
She had already dressed in a silk shirt and skirt which she considered suitable for the flight – remnants of her wardrobe left behind when she had gone to Cairo. Now she slipped on a matching lightweight jacket and wide-heeled, peep-toe shoes.
The door to the ‘ schoolroom’ was still firmly closed and she resisted the temptation to look in and tell Su Ming she was going out for a little while. On a normal day she would not interrupt; therefore today must be no different.
Alex will have to start attending proper school in Australia, she thought as she closed the front door behind her. And presumably she would be able to keep him with her even when he got older. In Hong Kong it was the practice to send children to boarding school in England at the age often or eleven, or maybe even younger, and she had not relished the thought of being parted from him.
At the stores she lingered a little, keeping one eye on the time. There was nothing more to be done at home – she would just be moping and getting more and more edgy.
But when she could postpone her return no longer, she suffered pangs of panic in case she was held up and got back late. The taxi was booked for midday; it was now eleven o’clock.
As she went back into the house she was struck by the hush. How quiet it was! Sometimes one of the houseboys would be singing and whistling as he worked, but not today. And there were no voices coming from the ‘ schoolroom’ either.
The first small suspicion that something was wrong jabbed at her, but she pushed it aside. Nerves, nerves! But she crossed the hall all the same and opened the ‘ schoolroom’ door.
The room was empty. Alex’s books and pencils were piled neatly on the table, his chair tucked beneath it. Her heart missed a beat and she went back into the hall and called his name.
‘Alex? Alex – where are you?’
No reply.
She ran upstairs and threw open his bedroom door. ‘Alex – are you here?’
More emptiness and still that ominous hush, broken only by her voice, her footsteps.
‘Su Ming! Alex!’ Panic was beginning to creep in now and she ran from room to room, opening doors and calling. Nothing! In her own room the cases lay on the bed where she had left them. But of Alex and Su Ming there was no sign anywhere.
‘Where are they?’ She was speaking aloud, her voice rising on a note of hysteria. ‘Where have they gone? Oh God, why did I go out?’
Back down the stairs she flew and into the dining room, where the newest of the houseboys was polishing the sideboard.
‘Have you seen …?’ She stopped. It was useless to ask him because he spoke little English as yet. But he rewarded her with a found, smooth smile.
‘In stu-dy. Stu-dy,’ he said proudly.
She nodded, her flying feet carrying her back across the hall. The door of Gordon’s study was ajar, she pushed it open and then stopped dead.
‘Gordon!’
He was sitting on the edge of his desk and looking straight at the door, as if waiting for her.
Shock seemed to drain all control out of her body and she stood stupidly holding on to the edge of the door and returning his stare like a mesmerised rabbit.
‘Elise.’ His tone was flat, controlled.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘You didn’t expect to find me at home?’ he countered.
‘Of course not. You went to work. You took the car. It’s not outside now.’
‘I came back by taxi in order not to alarm you. I still hoped that my suspicions about you were wrong, and if they had been I would have gone quietly back to the factory. But I wasn’t wrong, was I?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, her, voice rising.
He slid down from the table. ‘Come in, Elise, and shut the door. It’s time we had a talk, you and I.’
She looked around wildly. ‘Where’s Alex, Gordon?’
‘Don’t worry about Alex. I have asked Su Ming to take him out for the day. I thought it would be best if he were well out of the way.’
‘But …’
‘I know. You had other plans for him.’
She was white already; now she blanched even more.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ he pressed her. ‘You intended to take him and run off to Australia.’
She lifted her chin. ‘ Yes! I am convinced it’s not safe for him to be here. I don’t think it’s safe for any of us, but what you do is up to you.’
‘What Alex does is up to me, too.’
She took a step towards him, hands clenched. ‘So you seem to think. Well, he is my son, too. And I want to take him to Australia where he will be well away from any Japanese attack.’
‘Very laudable.’ Gordon moved from the desk to the cabinet and poured himself a gin. ‘ But you can’t expect me to believe that Alex’s welfare is your only motive. You proposing to go with that infernal Brittain scoundrel to set up home with him, I suppose. And you didn’t even have the decency to tell me what you were planning.’
‘I wanted to avoid a scene like this.’
‘I’m sure you did. You thought you could sneak off with my son and fly away while my back was turned. Thank heavens he is a great deal more honest than you are.’
‘He told you.’ Her voice was dull.
‘He told his amah that you were planning to take him on a holiday. His amah naturally told me.
‘Naturally.’ Oh yes, if Su Ming had realised what was happening, she would have done almost anything to stop it. She certainly wouldn’t want Alex to go to Australia without her. During the months when she had looked after him while his mother was away, she had come to look on him as her own child, Elise thought bitterly.
‘I’m sorry if I gave you a shock, Elise,’ Gordon said, almost conversationally. ‘And I’m sorry to have spoiled your plans.’
She was still trembling, but her mind was beginning to function again. At first she had been too startled even to think straight. Now her natural resilience began to assert itself. She couldn’t give up like this; she must fight him, for Alex’s sake if not for her own.
‘Where is Alex, Gordon?’
‘I told you, he has gone out for the day. By now he and Su Ming will be well on their way to Stanley.’
She glanced at her watch. Eleven-thirty. Half an hour before they were due at the airport. She could never do it, never get him back in time.
As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘What time was it that you were going? One o’clock?’
She looked at him narrowly. Neither Alex nor Su Ming had known times and dates, yet Gordon had known exactly when to get Alex out of the way – exactly when to be here, blocking her.
‘How did you know all this?’
Gordon sipped at his gin. ‘I told you – Alex told Su Ming.’
‘He didn’t know any details.’
‘No, he didn’t. But I guessed that there could only be one person involved in this holiday and I was pretty sure where you intended to go. So I phoned the Brittain home at Shek-o. I didn’t speak to your boyfriend – I didn’t think it would be too clever to warn him that I knew. I simply asked the boy who answered when the Cormorant plane was going to Australia. He was very obliging.’ He glanced at his own watch. ‘And now, my dear, if you intend to catch the plane, you really ought to be going.’
‘You should be going, I said. It would be a pity, after all this, if he were to leave without you!’
‘But …’ Her mouth had gone dry and she struggled to speak. ‘But Alex isn’t here.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I want to take him …’
The half smile hardened as Gordon’s eyes, coldly blue, held hers.
‘Oh no, Elise. You are not taking Alex anywhere. If you want to leave, I will not stop you. Go to Australia with your boyfriend, it that’s what you want. But Alex stays here.’
‘You mean …’ Words were almost beyond her.
‘Just what I say. I don’t want to keep you against your will, but my son stays with me. I shall never give him up. Not now. Not later. I told you before that if you behaved foolishly I would ensure that you never saw him again, and I meant it. So there you are, my dear. The choice is yours.’
For a moment she could not speak. She stood holding the edge of the table while the full realisation of his words came to her in great shuddering shocks.
She was free to go. But if she went, she had to leave Alex behind, not only abandoning him to the mercy of the Japanese in Hong Kong, but giving up her rights to him for all time. Gordon was forcing her to choose: Brit or Alex. She could have one, but not both.
Shudders rocked her and she pressed a hand to her head. As if from a long way off, she heard Gordon say, ‘You look as if you could do with a drink, my dear.’
He poured gin into a tumbler and passed it to her. She sipped at it deeply, feeling it sting her throat and not caring.
‘Well?’ Gordon pressed her.
‘Gordon, you bastard!’ Her voice was low and trembling. ‘I knew you would find a way to stop me if you knew. I told Brit that you would. He wanted me to tell you the truth, you know, and I refused because I was so certain that if I did, you would be sure to stop me. And you did know, didn’t you?’
‘I’m not stopping you.’
‘No? By threatening to take my child away from me – that’s not stopping me, I suppose?’
‘Alex will be quite all right with me; I’m not an ogre. And he has Su Ming. You went off without him quite happily before.’
‘But that was different!’ she cried. ‘I only expected to be gone for a little while when Mother was dying – a couple of months at most!’
‘In fact, you were away three-quarters of a year.’
‘But it wasn’t of my choosing! I would never have left him so long from choice, you must know that! And in any case, I didn’t know then what was going to happen here.’
‘Nothing is going to happen.’
‘It is, Gordon,’ she cried. ‘I cannot understand why you won’t believe it. Oh please, you must let him go! You can’t keep him here, he’s just a little boy. It will be terrible when it happens. Oh, please …’ She was crying now, tears running unchecked down her cheeks.
For the first time, Gordon showed a hint of impatience behind the hitherto iron self-control.
‘Pull yourself together, Elise,’ he snapped.
‘Please, Gordon!’
‘If you are going, then you ought to leave now.’
‘I’m not going!’ she shouted at him. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘It’s your decision.’
‘It’s not mine. My decision was to take my son as far away from the situation here as I possibly could, to remove him from any risk of danger. And if anything happens to him here because of your blind stupidity, I will never forgive you, Gordon.’
A muscle moved in his cheek. ‘Would that really be important now?’
Sobbing she sank to a chair, only to rise again. Her hands clenched and unclenched, her whole body was shaking and she could not keep still.
Oh God, she must do something! But there was nothing she could do.
Minutes ticked by, long and timeless. At ten minutes to twelve the taxi which she had ordered arrived. ‘Well, what shall I tell him to do?’ Gordon asked.
‘Send him away.’
‘Are you sure?’
She couldn’t answer; her throat was going into spasms.
As if through a haze she watched Gordon leave the room, then she beat helplessly with her hands at the arms of her chair, her face contorted and her whole body trembling. It was really happening, this incredible fiasco. She could do nothing … nothing …
By noon she was almost composed, staring with swollen eyes at the hands of the clock. At 12.15 the telephone rang.
Gordon set down his glass and stood up.
‘Shall I answer that? I suppose it will be Brittain.’
The tears flooded her eyes again and she bent her head. Her whole body seemed to be pleading, reaching out to him, but she did not move.
The set half smile returned to Gordon’s mouth. On other occasions she had noticed this expression and registered it as one of his defences; today she could not even see it for the blur of tears.
Through the open door she heard him on the telephone, his voice tight and controlled, but the words were lost in the singing fog within her head. A moment later he reappeared in the doorway.
‘You’d better come and speak to him yourself, Elise. He won’t believe me when I tell him you are not going with him.’
She stood up feeling oddly detached, seeming to watch herself from a great distance. Then the phone was in her hand.
‘Brit?’ Her voice was thick with tears, but totally flat. ‘ Yes, it’s me. Why aren’t you here?’
‘Didn’t Gordon tell you?’
‘He just said you are not coming. It’s not true, is it?’
‘Yes!’
‘But why, for God’s sake?’
‘He has taken Alex away. I can’t come with you and leave Alex behind.’
She heard Brit swear. ‘I can’t, Brit,’ she said again. ‘You will have to go without me. There is no alternative.’
Brit laughed bitterly. ‘Well, I should have known better than to trust a woman!’
‘Brit … for goodness sake, surely you don’t think …’
‘What else am I to think? After all, it is woman’s prerogative to change her mind, isn’t it? I just wish you had done so a little sooner.’
‘Brit – please listen to me!’
‘Sorry, Elise, I haven’t really got the time just now. There is a plane waiting to take off with two passengers aboard.’
‘Brit!’
But the line was dead.
Tears welled up in her eyes once more in a scalding, drenching flood. This was the final unbearable blow! Not only had she lost Brit, but he was blaming her for the decision not to go with him, thinking she didn’t care enough. And now there was no way she could convince him that he was wrong. Soon he would be going to China on a mission from which he might not return, and he would go believing that she didn’t care, with everything they had shared devalued.
Through the mist of tears she saw Gordon watching her and her mouth twisted to an expression of such hate that it stunned him.
‘I hope you are satisfied, Gordon,’ she spat at him. ‘But let me tell you, I shall never forgive you for as long as I live.’
Then she turned, running for the sanctuary of her room.
Chapter Twenty-Two
March passed and April began, with the days growing longer and hotter. But the cloud which had settled over the house in Kowloon remained.
Gordon, it was true, was rarely there; he was working even longer hours than before. Elise was glad: she had no wish to see him – even the sight of his possessions was enough to stir within her a twisting anger so great that she indulged in childish fits of rage directed against them: his hat thrown against the wall, his shoes stamped upon, a document left on his dressing-table ripped across. Always self-disgust overtook her and she would dissolve into fits of weeping.
What was happening to her that she could behave so foolishly?
She had been forced to give
up the man she loved with a goodbye almost as bad-tempered as their first meeting. But it had been her choice.
Now he was in China on a secret mission and probably in very real danger. But with a war going on, plenty of other women had men who were in dangerous situations and they couldn’t all be carrying on in this way.
She had a vindictive streak, she knew, which made it difficult to forgive a wrong, but not even that entirely accounted for the obsessive hatred, the perverse satisfaction she derived from letting him see how it was festering. There must be something else, surely …
In the middle of April the first suspicion occurred to her, gaining strength with every passing day until a month later it was almost a certainty. She thought about it when bathing in the mornings and when preparing for bed at night, examining her stomach for signs of roundness and her breasts for some indication of change. It was six years since she had been pregnant with Alex, yet now she recalled as if it were yesterday every sign and symptom, from the feeling of tightness in the pit of her stomach to the nausea on waking which returned during the day with certain odours – the sweet, heady perfume of spring flowers, the pungent smell of chicken and pork cooking in the open-fronted shops near the down-town street markets.
She remembered it all and knew without any doubt, long before she visited Dr Munro for confirmation. She was going to have a baby. And she was wonderfully, triumphantly certain that it would be Brit’s child.
The knowledge caught her as much in two minds as everything else seemed to do these days. She wanted it, of course – she had lost him, but nothing and no one could take this away from her – and in the stillness of the night there was comfort and delight in folding her arms over her stomach and knowing that deep inside her she was holding something of him.
But she was also desperately sad that she could not tell him, and afraid of what Gordon’s reaction would be when he knew. He would be furious, of course, with that cold anger which she had now come to know so well. But would he be angry enough to enforce his threat to divorce her and take Alex away from her? The thought was as paralysing as ever – and now she had the baby to think of, too.
Apprehension made her delay as long as she could before seeing Dr Munro, but when he had finally confirmed what she already knew she faced the fact that she could keep it from Gordon no longer.
