‘Will it be bad?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, far from it.’ He straightened up. ‘Can’t think what’s up with me. Damned embarrassing.’ He shook himself and swung back to her with a smile on his face, which she pretended not to notice wasn’t quite straight. ‘Nothing to get into a tizz over,’ he added. ‘Just that a convoy of Japanese troopships has been spotted out in the Pacific with battleship protection.’
‘Is it coming here?’
‘Highly unlikely. Cloud cover is so extensive and so low that the sighting was only brief. Don’t look alarmed.’ He tucked an arm around her waist and they continued their progress past the melon bed. ‘They’re probably heading for Saigon on a routine exercise. General Percival is being cautious, that’s all.’
‘But you have to go out looking for them?’
He nodded. ‘That’s the idea. Like finding a pin in a haystack, but my squadron boys have eyes like hawks.’
‘I wish you luck, Johnnie.’
‘Thanks.’ He paused awkwardly, and she wondered what was coming next. ‘I heard in the club that you had a bit of an accident yourself the other day.’
She blinked hard. The yellow melons seemed to swell into suns. ‘Yes.’
‘Sorry about that.’
She didn’t want to discuss it. ‘Nigel is over in the smoke-sheds,’ she told him.
‘Right.’
‘Will you say goodbye to him?’
‘Of course.’
He removed his arm from her waist and his shadow separated from hers. ‘I don’t have to ship out till late tonight, so I was thinking of going to the cinema.’
‘Oh, what a shame, Nigel has a white-tie gathering of the planters’ council to attend this evening.’
He leaned over and inspected a row of onions with exaggerated concentration. ‘I know.’ Without shifting his attention from the onions, he added casually, ‘It’s Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story. Supposed to be a stunner. I wondered whether you would like to come with me.’
She hadn’t expected that, and as she glanced up she found the figure of Razak in the archway, watching them. Slowly Connie let the breath out of her lungs.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’
Nigel asked the question as Connie was in the middle of tying his bow tie. She liked to do this small task for him. It was one of the rare times he invited her to touch him.
They were standing in his dressing room where the tall mirror reflected an elegant couple, one in his new white dinner jacket, the other in a cool eau-de-nil linen frock that left her arms bare and made her throat look soft and delicate. If she had caught sight of the two of them in a mirror, the woman attending to her husband’s tie in such an intimate and familiar manner, the man looking down at her with concern creasing his brow, she would have thought, What a happy couple.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ he asked again.
‘Of course not. I’ll enjoy it.’
‘Thanks, old thing. I just can’t get out of this blasted dinner, and I hate to think of Johnnie spending his last night alone. You’d be doing me a favour.’
‘I told you.’ She manoeuvred the fingers of silk back over on themselves with precision. ‘I will enjoy the film. It’s ages since I’ve been to the pictures.’
‘So you won’t be bored?’
‘No.’
‘Johnnie is good company,’ Nigel pointed out.
‘Yes, he is.’
‘So have fun.’
She put the finishing touches to the tie, straightened it and patted the front of his dress shirt with the palms of both hands. ‘You are a good-looking man, Nigel Hadley.’
‘Don’t be daft.’ But he was pleased, she could tell.
The wireless was playing, Jack Hilton’s dance band, but there had been no mention of a convoy of troopships. Presumably they didn’t want to cause panic, but she resented the silence, the bureaucratic and military secrecy that assumed the public were nitwits who deserved nothing but dance bands. Palur had a harbour, admittedly small but still a harbour, and harbours were bombed in wartime. Even she could work that one out.
‘Nigel, don’t you think we should build some kind of underground shelter, like they have in London? An Anderson shelter, I think they call them.’
He had moved over to a small teak cabinet from which he had taken a silver hip flask, but he looked round at her with a frown, making his long face even longer, the flask poised halfway to his lips. She was sorry that she’d spoiled the moment.
‘Whatever for?’ he asked.
‘In case we need … well … protection.’
He took a quick swig from the flask. Brandy, probably. ‘No,’ he said sternly, ‘don’t talk like that, Constance. It’s defeatist.’
She let it go. Instead, she walked over and kissed his cheek before he could escape. His skin smelled of a musky cologne that she wanted to linger over but she stepped back, patted his chest once more and smiled.
‘I wish you were coming to see the film with us,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry. You’ll be in good hands with Johnnie.’
Oh, Nigel. Don’t you see? It’s not Johnnie’s hands I’m worried about. It’s my own.
Dead meat.
The words thudded dully inside Madoc’s aching skull. Where the hell had he heard them before? His mind was all over the place, his thoughts fractured into a thousand parts that wouldn’t join up. He opened one eye a crack. He was in his own bed. Twilight outside. Morning or night? He had no idea. He could smell the river. He could smell his own body. He tried to move but everything hurt, every part of him. Some hurt real bad. Bats flitted outside the window, jerky and bewildering, and his cloudy mind became convinced they were gathering to drink his blood. He tried to open his other eye but it was swollen shut.
‘Awake at last! About bloody time. I’ve never known anyone so determined to stay asleep.’
Kitty was standing next to his bed, a cup of something in one hand, a wash cloth in the other. He made his one eye focus on her face. It was plump and lined and angry, but right now it was the most beautiful face in the whole damn world.
‘Kitty, what happened?’
‘How the hell do I know?’
‘I don’t remember coming home.’
‘I daresay.’
Slowly images were trickling back into his mind.
‘Fuck the bastard!’ He licked his teeth and his tongue caught on a broken tooth.
‘Who was it?’ she asked.
‘Bull Chan.’
‘You stupid, imbecilic oaf ! I told you to watch yourself.’ She leaned over him and peered closely into his eye. ‘Is it bad?’
He made the mistake of shaking his head, and strange coloured sparks burst into life inside it, explosions numbing his ears.
‘No. How did I get home?’
‘When you weren’t back here by nightfall, I took the canoe and went looking for you.’
‘You paddled all that way in the dark?’
She shrugged. ‘You were just lazing around on the riverbank. I brought you home.’ She frowned sternly. ‘Next time I promise I’ll leave you there for the rats to chew on.’
‘There won’t be a next time.’
‘There had better not be.’ She started to wash his face. She wasn’t gentle. ‘When will you learn not to tread on Bull Chan’s toes?’
Madoc closed his good eye and submitted to her vigorous ministrations. When she’d finished he forced his aching body to sit up, feeling the jagged ends of his ribs grating on each other.
Kitty shook her head slowly. ‘How would I ever finish building our casino without you?’
Madoc spat out part of a tooth. ‘Is that all I am to you? A fucking bricklayer?’
‘Yes.’
But she wrapped her arms around him, breathing hard against his skin and held him close.
The Purple Pussy’s doors opened onto a backstreet of the town, the kind of street where bets were laid on cock fights a
nd men with the whites of their eyes smeared yellow by opium led their lives in a fog of lies and fantasies, eyes rolling like marbles in their head. It was a street of pimps and prostitutes, of short tempers and long hatreds. Fights flared and knives flashed. Sometimes men cried out in that street, sometimes they died.
Maya hurried on silent feet through the darkness, alert for one of Hakim’s stray wolf cubs. They had a tendency to hang around outside, wanting to finger the merchandise before it went on stage, but tonight she reached The Purple Pussy’s dressing room unscathed. She didn’t feel sick any more. Whatever evil eye the white lady had inflicted on her had vanished soon after Maya had fled the boat. Hah! So much for the lady’s power! Maya was pleased with herself. She had overcome the sickness and only retched once when she reached home, eager to tell her brother about the floating house that had whispered in her ear with its rattles and creaks and moans, sending shivers down her spine.
In the cramped and crowded dressing room she dropped her kebaya and sarong on the floor and started to oil her limbs so that they would gleam under the stage lights. An extraordinarily tall Malay boy with eyes outlined in kohl like a woman’s and wearing a dress of seven veils, was biting his long, painted nails nervously. He was next on stage.
‘Don’t worry, Tunku,’ she told him. ‘Once you’re waving your little ass in their faces, no one will even notice the spots on your chin.’
‘I look a wreck.’
She paused in the process of oiling her small breasts. ‘Tunku, you look good enough to eat. They’ll gobble you up.’
He giggled, blew her a kiss and scuttled out of the door. She pulled on her skimpy costume and followed him. The air in the club was as grey and thick as rabbit’s fur, cigarette smoke hanging like a shroud above the tables. The mood was rowdy tonight. Most of the bawdy shouts at the boy with veils were coming from a table of British soldiers right at the front. She would have to watch out for them. They might try to touch. At the side against the wall, on his own as usual, sat the man with the sad eyes, hunched over his whisky, and right in the middle of the club sprawled two fat men at a table with a bottle of gin on it, almost empty. In the dim light she could see the sweat in the folds of their skin and the hunger rippling across their greedy eyes.
She closed her eyes tight. This was the last time. She swore it under her breath. Never again. She cursed The Purple Pussy. She cursed Hakim to a thousand tortures in hell for eternity, and roasted by devils with more gold teeth than he could cram into his mouth in five lifetimes. She had to get away. Had to get Razak away. Somewhere safe.
The tall boy shimmied off the stage, naked now and dashed past her, his veils clutched in one hand trailing behind him.
‘You’re on,’ he hissed.
This was the last time.
Johnnie Blake and Connie walked out of the Empire cinema smiling. It was impossible not to smile after a film like that, impossible not to laugh when a tipsy Katharine Hepburn was carried up to the house in the arms of the glamorous James Stewart, and Johnnie had leaned close to whisper, ‘It must be like carrying a scrawny giraffe, all legs and teeth.’
Afterwards Johnnie walked Connie to the Sequin Club, where a band called The Silver Stars blasted out syncopated rhythms on trumpets and saxophones, and the strummer of the double bass rolled his eyes at Connie each time Johnnie swept her past on the dance floor. He danced well. He talked well. He listened well. He held her lightly in his arms as they performed a foxtrot, and neither of them breathed a word about what had taken place in the vegetable garden earlier that day. Instead, they talked of jazz and Fred Astaire’s films and whether King George VI would ever let his brother, Edward, take over a useful role in England now that he had abdicated for the American divorcée, Mrs Simpson. They talked of many things, but they didn’t mention Nigel. Not once.
They drank a bottle of champagne between them, and Connie tried hard not to enjoy herself so much but she noticed the way they leaned nearer to each other across the small round table till their heads were almost touching. The way their fingers skimmed the other’s sleeve or bare arm, feeling the imprint on their skin, and the way gaps started to open up in their conversation. Small, dangerous holes.
She made herself stand up. ‘I should be getting home.’
‘Must you? It’s only eleven o’clock. Those planters’ dinners of Nigel’s go on into the early hours, and I don’t have to make a move until …’
‘No, Johnnie. I’m tired.’
He knew she was lying, but he jumped to his feet with an unexpected burst of energy, a wide smile in place.
‘Of course, I’m being selfish. You must be dead on your feet after …’
Words drifted from nowhere into her head. Dead on your feet. Dead in the air. Shot out of the sky in a ball of flames. ‘Johnnie,’ she said quietly, ‘don’t take any risks, will you?’ She took his hand in hers and held it.
‘Don’t you know, Connie, that the whole of life is a risk?’
For a moment in the middle of the crowded, smoky nightclub with lights glittering on diamonds and music blaring out a seductive beat, they stood totally alone. Their eyes locked together. Finally, with an effort, she dropped his hand and moved aside, denying herself something that would fill the empty place in her chest.
‘Connie.’
She made herself smile.
‘Let’s drink,’ he said, scooping up their champagne glasses from the table, each with a mouthful at the bottom. It was flat but it didn’t matter. ‘To our future.’ He pressed the stem of the glass into her hand.
She raised the rim to her lips. ‘To your future,’ she corrected in a gentle tone, ‘a safe and happy future.’
They stared at each other, then drank.
Outside, the world was dark and damp. A fine drizzle was falling from a bank of low cloud, but the day’s heat still radiated off the buildings and wafted along the pavements like something alive and venomous. As they walked along Alexandra Parade, heading towards the Victoria Club where her Chrysler was parked, with Ho Bah probably stretched out across the front seats fast asleep, she made a point of avoiding the bank where she had sat answering the police questions after the accident.
They walked with a discreet distance between them, their footsteps echoing on the deserted pavements. Street lamps cast yellow triangles like stepping stones across the road, and the storm drains gurgled contentedly. They hurried, heads ducked against the raindrops, but suddenly Connie felt Johnnie’s hand under her elbow and he was steering her down a side street away from the reach of the occasional car headlights that slid down the main road.
‘Johnnie, what is it?’
He drew her into a doorway to shelter from the rain. ‘I have a bad feeling, Connie, about this mission that I’ll be flying. I have a nagging sense that something is going to go wrong.’
‘Oh, Johnnie, I’m sure you’ll come back to us safe and sound.’
‘I want to say goodbye to you properly, not in front of all the others hanging around the Club car park.’
‘It’s been a wonderful evening. Thank you, I …’
He leaned forward and kissed her lips. She shot backwards as if she’d been burned. ‘No, Johnnie, I’m married. And my husband is your good friend.’ She stepped out into the rain, hurrying blindly towards the lights, but Johnnie caught up with her just before the main road. He swung her round to face him.
‘Connie,’ he breathed, ‘don’t.’
This time when he kissed her she couldn’t make herself pull away, and without reference to her wishes her limbs entwined around him. Relishing the texture of his hair, the softness of the skin below his ear, the muscular strength of his arms gripping her and the crippling need that fused her together with him. She was shamed by her body. By its refusal to let him go. By its blatant desire, by the pulsing heat between her legs and the eagerness of her mouth to open to his.
Neither of them heard the footsteps approaching out of the darkness.
‘Good evening, Johnnie.’<
br />
Connie and Johnnie leaped apart.
‘Good evening, Nigel,’ Johnnie said.
‘It meant nothing, you know, Nigel,’ Connie insisted.
‘Did it?’
‘We were saying goodbye, that’s all.’
They were in Nigel’s SS Jaguar, bumping over the rough road out to the estate after saying goodnight to Johnnie at the Club. Somewhere in the distance lightning flashed once, splitting the night sky in half, and the rain fell harder. The wipers squeaked each time they swept across the windscreen. On the road behind, her Chrysler’s headlights bobbed in and out of their rear window as the syce negotiated the ruts in their wake.
‘If it was nothing, Constance, just a goodbye, why did you both hide in a backstreet to say it?’ He didn’t look at her. Eyes straight ahead on the road.
‘We weren’t hiding.’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘No. It was more private there than in the Club’s car park, that’s why. Johnnie is nervous about tomorrow.’
‘Is he?’
‘Yes. He needed someone to hold onto for a moment, to steady him. Nothing more.’
‘I see.’
She swivelled in her seat, so that she was facing him. His profile was picked out by the lights behind, and she could see that something wasn’t right in the set of his jaw. It looked crooked, as though someone had hit it.
‘Do you see, Nigel? That sometimes a person needs physical contact with another, to remind them that life is more than . . . ’
‘I know,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘Is that why he had a hand in your hair? His mouth on yours? Is that why you looked as though you were trying to climb inside him? Just to say goodbye?’
‘Yes.’
She heard his teeth click together sharply in the darkness. She slumped back against the passenger door to get as far from him as possible in the narrow confines of the car, and to inhale the waves of tepid air that billowed through the open window. It ruffled her hair the way Johnnie’s fingers had done. For a long time neither of them spoke, and the roadside palm trees loomed down, rustling their fronds, unseen in the darkness. They listened to the perpetual croak of the frogs and the song of the cicadas because it was preferable to listening to each other’s quietly controlled breathing.
The White Pearl Page 12
