‘Come,’ she said.
She drew the young Malay along a path that ran round to the rear of Hadley House where a tall cypress hedge formed the edge of the separate part of the garden.
‘This is the veg patch,’ she told him, and led him through an archway cut into the hedge. ‘This is probably where Malik, our head gardener, will keep you working first of all.’
It was just a vegetable garden. That’s all. Nothing special. She liked to grow vegetables even more than flowers, and performed much of the planting and picking herself. It was just something that was always there, a part of her life she took for granted. Until she saw Razak’s reaction. His eyes were huge and his mouth hung open in astonishment.
‘Very, very big,’ he murmured.
Was it? It seemed a normal size to her. ‘We manage to eat everything,’ she commented.
He held up three fingers. ‘You, Tuan Hadley and boy.’
‘And the servants, of course.They eat the produce as well. It’s only fair, as they are the ones that have to chase off the monkeys and parrots. I swear there is one particular monkey with a bald tail who believes I grow all the melon and squash just for his personal use.’
He laughed. For the first time something relaxed in this young man’s stance, and he no longer seemed ready to run off like one of the small deer that ventured into the garden occasionally. They would flee if you so much as blinked at them. She didn’t want Razak to flee.
‘Would you like to take some vegetables home with you?’ she offered.
‘I not a monkey. Not parrot.’
Connie blushed. ‘I know.’
He knelt on the red earth, plucked a yellow pepper from its stem and took a bite out of it. She could imagine it warm and sunny on his tongue. He looked up and he smiled at her, and in that moment she knew he would stay.
‘Welcome to Hadley House,’ she said.
‘Thank you. Terimah kasih.’
‘Where did you learn to speak English?’
‘I was houseboy. In Palur.’
‘Really? Well, if you prefer, you could be a houseboy here, and …’
But she could feel him withdraw. As if she’d suggested he step into a snake pit. He shook his head and sank his teeth into the yellow flesh of the pepper once more.
‘I like veg patch.’
She laughed. ‘So do I.’
Maya stomped up and down her shanty street, bubbling with impatience. Where was he? Why wasn’t he back? Had the white lady silenced him? Had she taken one look at him and let her husband put him to work with the coolies in the rubber forest? That was hard work, brutal on the hands and the back, and she’d heard whispered tales of men who had spent so many years in the forest that their hearts had been stolen by jungle spirits. Their hearts were strung up in the canopy of the trees at night, flashing and dancing like fireflies, crying out in pain. She hadn’t seen them herself, but others had. She didn’t want that to happen to her brother.
She slunk into her tiny hovel, threw herself down on the floor and sat with her knees tucked tight under her chin. It was stifling in here, and a giant millipede was wriggling its fat body towards the doorway. She lifted one foot and thumped the back of her bare heel down on the creature. She was supposed to be out selling flowers for Hakim, but couldn’t think of anything right now except seeing her brother come home safely. She’d pay for it later when Hakim and his cubs got their paws on her. But so what?
She’d never owned a watch and couldn’t tell the time even if she did, but she could see shadows move. That’s how she told the hours passing, and today the shadows moved slowly across the rattan mat. Her hair hung damp and clinging around her small face, and she flicked it back, twisting it up on the top of her head in a black coil, pinning it there with a split piece of bamboo. She struggled to shut down her thoughts, to let them drift in the heat that clogged the room, but it was impossible because her mind was like a rat, scurrying from place to place, seeking out dark holes. When Razak finally appeared in the hut, she jumped to her feet.
‘Where have you been all this time?’
His arms were piled high with vegetables, with melons and aduki beans and other greenery stacked all the way up to his chin. She laughed and pinched a cucumber.
‘I went to Hadley House,’ he said. ‘Like you told me.’
He moved over to the corner, opened his arms and dropped the heap of produce on the floor. Dust rose in the air.
‘Give it all to Salid for his pigs,’ Razak muttered. ‘I will eat nothing that she has grown.’
Maya sat him down on the mat, poured him a cup of chaya and waited cross-legged on the floor for her brother to come back to her. The white lady has stolen him.
‘I asked,’ he said at last, ‘to work in the garden. Like you told me.’
‘Good.’
‘She took me over it.’ He paused, and Maya saw something of pleasure in his eyes. ‘It is a beautiful garden. So much space for just three people.’
They both looked at their own tiny room and said nothing.
‘Then?’ she prompted.
‘The vegetable garden is huge. She calls it her veg patch. It is five times the size of old Grenya’s plot, remember him? He used to feed his family of ten off it, and still have plenty left over to sell in the market.’
‘I remember.’
‘She said it was grown for her family and her servants. But the servants must be selling it in the market and she doesn’t realise.’ He shook his head in bemusement. ‘How could she be so stupid?’
‘All whites are stupid about understanding anyone but themselves. What happened after that?’
‘She left me with the head gardener. He comes from Penang, and talks as if the garden is his own. I think he may be turning into a plant himself because he has strange growths on his feet that look like roots and his tongue is as loose as an ageing leaf.’
Eagerness sharpened Maya’s voice. ‘What did this old leaf say?’
‘He told me that she takes the boy to school in Palur each morning and collects him when the sun is high. She no longer drives. Their syce drives her instead.’
Maya frowned. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
‘At the weekend,’ he continued, ‘she rides her horse early when the morning is still cool. The Tuan Besar leaves when it is still dark and doesn’t come back until the sun has set. Sometimes they drive out to friends in the evening. The gardener says the syce takes them. That is because the Tuan likes to drink and the roads are rough.’
He stopped talking and studied his sister closely from under his long dark lashes. ‘You are satisfied?’
She smiled at him. ‘I love this gardener as if he were my own father.’
‘More than our own father, you mean.’
They both laughed, but it was a fragile ripple of sound in the hot room. Their father was a tin-mine worker. He used to beat them and his wife whenever the mood took him, but one day he vanished. Gone to live with his brother snakes, their mother used to say with venom.
Maya gestured towards the pile of vegetables in the corner. ‘Let me sell them.’
Razak shook his head. ‘They are fit only for pigs.’
Maya sighed but didn’t argue. Instead, she laid out before him a meal of lamb curry with rice, and a Tiger beer to wash it down.
‘I had a good day with the flower-selling,’ she lied.
She didn’t tell him about the envelope she’d found behind the pots on the shelf.
Connie was restless. It rained that night, a fierce, shuddering downpour that seemed to shake the house and rattle the roof. She checked on Teddy but he hadn’t stirred. She liked to look at him in his sleep, even through the mosquito net, his cheek warm and flushed on his pillow. Nightly she tracked the blunting of his baby appearance and the sharpening of what would become his adult features: his jaw, his brow, the width of his nostrils. She told herself that if she watched him closely like this, it would never come as a shock when suddenly he stood before her as a
young man, legs the length of his father’s. The child hidden away deep inside him.
She lifted the net and kissed his damp forehead, brushing the strands of hair from his face. ‘Sleep tight, sweetheart,’ she whispered and stroked his chest. It was a habit she couldn’t break out of, this feeling for the feathery beat of his heart. She crept out of his bedroom and when she reached her own, Nigel was sitting on the bed removing his socks. He had nice feet, smooth and elegantly shaped.Which was just as well because his lower legs and lower arms were about all she got to see of his person, these days. For a moment she wondered what he would do if she walked over to him and started undoing his shirt buttons. Flap her away probably, the way he flapped at moths that sneaked in through the shutters.
‘I didn’t think much of that Fitzpayne fellow,’ Nigel commented. ‘Don’t like his ideas.’
Connie sighed and stretched out on her side of the bed, arms above her head. The murmur of the fan on the ceiling was as incessant as the rain.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I didn’t take to him. But he’s a friend of Johnnie’s, so we couldn’t exactly throw him out on his ear, could we?’
Nigel grunted and departed into his dressing room. She raised both legs straight in the air. Her skirt tumbled around her hips and she enjoyed the pleasure of having naked thighs, the breeze from the fan brushing against them, warm as someone’s breath. She closed her eyes.
‘Constance, I don’t think you should employ that native boy.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘No good will come of it.’
She could hear him puffing, his breath strained. He performed fifty press-ups every night in his dressing room.
‘Nigel, I just want to help them. After what I did, it’s the least I can offer.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Macintyre said so. You don’t owe them anything.’
She said nothing. Her hand stroked the curve of her calf and the soft underside of her knee.
‘Better not to get involved, old thing.’
Old thing. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and jumped to her feet. She walked over to his dressing room and leaned against the door frame. He was forcing himself through his press-ups, elbows shaking now, his cheeks vermilion. A vein clicked in and out at his temple.
‘Nigel, what if he’s right?’
‘Who?’
‘That Fitzpayne fellow. What if the Japanese do come down through the jungle from the north? We’ll be right in their path.’
‘There’s no chance …’ he struggled to straighten his arms, ‘… of that.’
‘But shouldn’t we be prepared? Just in case. I mean …’
‘No need.’
‘But it seems to me that …’
‘Don’t fret so.’
She bit her tongue and waited against the door frame while he finished his exercises. God, she needed a cigarette. She always did when she was annoyed. Nigel eventually stood up and headed straight into the bathroom, splashing water around like a hippo. It was the same every night. When he emerged, wrapped in his silk robe, she was still waiting. He looked at her and frowned.
‘Let it go, Constance. The Japs have no backbone and no aircraft worth a damn against our Brewster Buffaloes. They don’t stand a chance and they know it, so don’t get yourself upset about it. People like Johnnie know what they’re talking about. Take no notice of Fitzpayne and his like. They’re spineless.’ He patted her shoulder and climbed into bed, lowering the mosquito net around himself like a bridal veil.
Connie perched on the edge of the bed. ‘But we should still be prepared.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Constance, even if by the remotest chance they did somehow get through the mountains and the jungle, they’d have more sense than to harm people like us. They need our rubber. They need me to make it for them. So,’ he smiled at her reassuringly and patted her pillow, ‘come to bed and stop worrying.’
She walked into her own dressing room and dropped her clothes on the floor, inspecting her naked body in the Cheval looking-glass with a critical eye.
‘But they don’t need me,’ she murmured. ‘Or Teddy.’
‘I want to make love to you, Connie.’
The words made the lines blur on the page of the book she was reading. Even now, two years later, she recalled it. It was The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Sho had brought her high up into the hills, miles away from anyone or any place she knew. The clarity and the coolness of the air made her giddy with relief. They were seated on a patch of grass in the shade, back to back, reading their books, propping each other up like bookends.
I want to make love to you, Connie.
She’d put down her book and kissed Sho’s mouth. Slowly she unbuttoned his white shirt and kissed his heart. Her hands caressed his chest, fingering each muscle, each rib, each rise and fall as his breath came fast. His skin tasted as warm and spicy as cinnamon toast.
They made love in the open air, something she had never done before, with only a gibbon monkey booming somewhere in the distance and the sound of crickets all around them. It felt extraordinary. The beat of her own heart thundered in her ears and her body stretched its limbs and abandoned itself like a cat in the sun. She knew she had jumped off a cliff but instead of falling to earth, she was flying.
*
It was still dark when she woke, but at least the rain had stopped. She could hear it dripping from the trees outside like tears. She lay flat on her back, remembering. Once when she and Sho were naked on the bed in a hotel room in KL popping tiny wild strawberries into each other’s mouths and laughing as he painted one of her nipples with the pink juice, he had asked, ‘When were you last held by your husband like this?’ He wrapped his arms around her, trailing sticky fingers down her shoulder blades and over her hip bones.
‘Years ago.’
He dipped his head and licked her nipple, and she moaned.
‘And when did you last make love with your husband?’
‘Years and years ago.’
Four years and three months ago, to be exact. Her eyes struggled now to find her husband’s shape in the darkness. In the first months of their marriage everything had been normal, or as normal as she imagined other newlyweds to be, which meant a kiss goodnight before Nigel turned out the light every weekday and sex on Saturdays and Sundays. He worked damn hard on the estate, she told herself. He was too tired during the week. It was normal.
But the way Harriet Court went on about her demure and running-to-fat husband, Henry, pestering her in bed several times a night – voracious was her word for him – Connie did wonder how normal was normal? After Teddy was born Nigel didn’t touch her for a year and then only because she instigated it. It was when she suggested another baby that his interest in her was rekindled, but the sex became perfunctory. No lingering. No licking of nipples. No mouth-to-mouth kissing. Outwardly she smiled and kissed his cheek, inwardly she screamed.
For whatever reason the second baby didn’t happen, and Nigel looked at her as if he’d been stabbed in the stomach each month when the first treacherous spots of her period started.
‘I’m sorry,’ she used to say. Because she was sorry. Sorry for both of them.
‘That’s all right, old thing. Next time, I expect.’
But his brown eyes looked muddy and his mouth had that tightness to it that Teddy’s had when he was determined not to cry. Eventually he’d stopped hoping. Stopped trying. He left her alone on her side of the bed and lay alone on his, politely rebuffing any advances from her. That was when the chasm spread down the centre of the sheet and Connie had watched it widen. Night by night, year by year. Bed became a place that she dreaded because it was a place of … Her throat hurt. Of failure. Of frustration. Of loneliness. Take your pick. Some nights she would sit outside on the veranda braving the mosquitoes, reading her book until the early hours of the morning. Nigel never mentioned that she was missing from his bed. Sometimes she wondered if he noticed.
She rolled onto her side,
facing her husband’s back, listening to his steady breathing and the murmur of the wind ruffling the leaves of the coral tree outside. For a long time she lay like that, eyes wide open. Then she moved forward and gently wrapped herself around his body, moulding her curves to his, her arm draped across his waist. He didn’t move. Didn’t break the rhythm of his breath. But she was certain he was awake and, what was worse, that he was aware that she knew he was awake.
She remained like that, unmoving, for what must have been half an hour, breathing quietly against the back of his neck, inhaling the scent of him again. When she finally rolled away onto her own side of the bed, he made no sound. The silence in the room belonged to a grave.
8
Swimming is like crying. It flushes everything out into the water. The water wasn’t cold in the Victoria Club’s outdoor pool, but nonetheless it was cooling to Connie’s skin and when her skin was cool, she could think better. She needed to think. To work out how best to protect her son from the war that was coming to Malaya. If her husband was too damn stubborn, too stiff-necked to admit that the country was about to have a gun thrust in its face, then she would have to do it on her own.
She flipped onto her back and did another ten lengths of crawl.
‘Connie, aren’t you ever coming out of the pool?’ Harriet Court called.
Above her, the sky arched in a white colourless sheet. It looked as though it had been burned by the sun and healed in a shiny bleached scar. Connie closed her eyes to shut it out, and did another fast twenty lengths.
‘Connie! If you don’t get out of that water right now, you’ll be all shrivelled.’
Didn’t Harriet realise that it was when she was out of the water that she shrivelled?
Connie loved Harriet because of her laugh. It was a raucous, witch-like cackle that had a tendency to silence a room, but it always gave Connie the giggles. Harriet wore her dark hair in a sharp bob at jaw level and possessed strong, almost masculine features in total contrast to her dreamy brown eyes and soft little chin which she often propped in her hand, as if her head and all it contained were too heavy for the narrow stem of her neck.
The White Pearl Page 8
