The White Pearl

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘From parang,’ Razak whispered over her shoulder.

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘Tuan, of course. He do it.’

  ‘Nigel,’ she bent over her husband’s face and peeled his arms away. The pallor of his skin shocked her. His lips were blue. ‘It’s OK, Nigel. Not too bad. I don’t think the bone is broken but you’re losing blood.’ As she spoke she tore off her blouse, leaving her half decent in a damp silk chemise, and yanked out the leather cord that held her hat on. ‘I’ll do everything I can.’ His brown eyes were so dark they were almost purple, and didn’t look like Nigel’s. ‘It will hurt, I’m afraid, but …’ She touched his cheek.

  He nodded and closed his eyes, sweat beading on his skin. Immediately she bound the hat cord around his leg just above the knee, and fastened it as tightly as she could. She seized a thin stick from the ground, pushed it under the cord and twisted until the tourniquet bit into his skin. Connie had never dealt with a wound before, nothing worse than a scratch or a shallow cut, and the sight of this one terrified her. But her fingers were steady as she inspected it closely.

  ‘Nigel,’ she said in a firm voice, ‘don’t worry. It’s just a flap of flesh that is lying open. I’ll close it, bandage it up and get you home. Doctor Rossiter will give you stitches. You’re going to be fine.’

  Just a flap of flesh. A lump of gore hanging by a thread.

  I’ll get you home. How? How, in this godforsaken country?

  With relief she fetched the hip flask of antiseptic, poured a few drops over her fingers, then began picking out the snippets of bark and leaf that the parang had deposited in the wound. Everything was soaked in blood, but the flow of it was definitely stemming now that she had tied the strap around his leg. The tourniquet must be hurting Nigel, but it was doing its job and only once did he let out a brief shout when she pulled a flake of bark and a length of muscle lifted up with it.

  She murmured to him non-stop, a gentle flow of words. She had no idea what they were, as she sluiced antiseptic over the raw flesh and heard him grunt. Sweat was stinging her eyes. When she looked up she was astonished to see Razak kneeling on one side of Nigel holding his hand and muttering to him in Malay, while Teddy knelt on his other side, gripping his hand as if he were drowning, never taking his stricken eyes from his father’s face.

  Nigel’s skin was gunmetal grey but his eyes were open, his mouth set in a tight line. Connie’s heart went out to him, as she wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand and set about closing the wound. She lifted the loose chunk of his calf and pressed it back on his leg, holding it down hard and trying to ignore the mute shivers that shook her husband’s body. With care she smoothed the ridges from the skin, pulling the edges straight, and then bandaged her blouse around his leg. She cut strips off the sleeves to use as ties to keep it tight.

  ‘There,’ she said and from somewhere the muscles of her face found the strength to smile. ‘All done. I’ve fixed it up as best I can until a doctor can take a look at it. But the leg will be fine, I’m sure.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He said it so politely, she had to fight back tears. I’m your wife, Nigel, your wife.

  Her hands were smeared with blood, so she wiped them on the grass while Teddy rounded up the horses and led them over. She gave him a hug. Razak was silent, still on his knees beside Nigel, but his large black eyes were on Connie. He gave no sign of what was going on in his head and it took all her self-control not to shout at him the things that were going on in hers.

  ‘You’ll have to ride,’ she said quietly to Nigel.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I could leave you here and ride home to fetch a doctor, but it would mean a much longer delay.’

  ‘No.’ He pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘I can ride.’

  ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood. You’ll be weak.’

  He gave her a lopsided grimace. ‘I can ride in my sleep.’

  ‘So you’re the last of the wild cavalry men,’ she smiled.

  He nodded awkwardly and held out a hand for her to help him up. It was a struggle, but with the aid of Teddy and Razak they hoisted Nigel up onto one leg and then onto his horse. Connie saw the scarlet flower on the muslin bandage swell in size the moment he was vertical.

  ‘Lead the way, son,’ Nigel said to Teddy.

  The boy cast an anxious glance at his father, and kicked his pony into a slow trot. Connie walked beside Nigel, leading her horse, while Razak walked on the other side of him. Together they could hold him steady.

  ‘No need,’ Nigel muttered.

  ‘I don’t want you falling off,’ she said.

  He scowled. ‘I don’t intend to fall off.’

  But after a while the effort of sitting upright was too much, and he slumped over his horse’s neck. The journey home was agonisingly slow. The heat grew worse, the humidity under the trees suffocating, so that her chemise was plastered to her body. Around their heads swirled clouds of hungry black flies drawn by the blood, but all Connie was aware of was the darkening of the muslin and what looked like scarlet coins that started to tumble from the heel of his ankle-boot to lay a trail along the moist ground.

  She hated the way the beautiful dark-skinned boy talked quietly to Nigel in a language she couldn’t understand, and she couldn’t forgive the way he’d said so eagerly, Tuan, of course. He do it. In Connie’s mind there was no of course about it.

  15

  ‘Nigel, how did it happen?’

  ‘Just an accident.’

  Connie was seated beside the bed. Nigel was sitting up in his pyjamas and there was a bamboo cage over his leg to keep the sheet off the bandages. A tray lay on his lap and she was encouraging him to eat some egg and toast, but he had little appetite. His cheeks were flushed. He had a slight fever.

  Doctor Rossiter had been wonderful, the skill in his gentle hands spilling into the room and calming fears. The wound was thoroughly cleaned, tendons and ligaments stitched together, the skin sutured, the leg bandaged. Nigel was as weak as a kitten from loss of blood, but was given something that looked like a horse tablet to make him sleep. At four o’clock in the morning he had woken in the dark to find Connie in a chair at his bedside.

  ‘Hungry?’ she’d asked hopefully. He needed to eat, the doctor said, because he’d lost so much blood.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How’s the pain?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer but shook out two tablets from the bottle on the bedside table and handed them to him with a cup of milky tea. He grimaced but swallowed them. So the pain must be bad. He dozed in and out of a troubled sleep for the next hour. While it was still dark, Teddy crept in and sat quietly on her lap for some time but eventually slid away on tiptoe to feed Pippin. When Nigel woke again, the sun was starting to sneak its fingers through the gaps of the shutters and there was the sound of activity on the gravel outside. Nigel narrowed his eyes at the window and frowned.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Connie told him. ‘Davenport is taking care of everything.’

  Davenport was the plantation manager, a man with a big voice and an insatiable capacity for hard work.

  ‘Thank you, Constance.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For bringing me home yesterday.’

  ‘Nigel, how did it happen?’

  ‘Just an accident.’ He flicked his fingers to dismiss the question, but they had no strength.

  ‘You’ve chopped branches before, and always been so careful.’

  ‘I was careful this time.’

  She let her gaze linger on his face. There was something lost about it, a muddy uncertainty in his eyes and an unaccustomed looseness about his mouth. As if he had frightened himself. She rested her hand on his arm and stroked it, not on his skin but on the sheet that covered it.

  ‘Not careful enough,’ she said gently. ‘Did something happen to make your hand slip?’

  ‘No.’

  Too fast. Much too fast. She could feel the heat under her fing
ers.

  ‘Try to eat a little more.’

  But he’d closed his eyes. Shut her out.

  ‘Teddy.’

  Her son was bent over his farmyard jigsaw, clutching the cockerel in his hand, the tip of his tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth. He looked up at her quickly, as though fearing bad news. It was Monday morning and she should be taking him to school, but she didn’t have the heart. He needed to be near his father today.

  ‘Daddy is asleep now, but he’s on the mend. He asked me to tell you that you were a big help to him yesterday. Riding just ahead of him, leading the way home.’

  ‘I remembered the paths well, didn’t I?’

  ‘You certainly did. Better than I could. I was proud of you.’

  She saw tears spring into his eyes and he looked down at his jigsaw, abandoned the cockerel and picked up a patch of blue sky.

  ‘Daddy will get better soon,’ she said with conviction.

  He nodded and pretended to concentrate on finding a matching piece of sky, his nose two inches from the jigsaw.

  ‘Teddy,’ Connie sat down at the table beside her son, ‘tell me what happened. Just before the accident.’

  His eyes skipped to hers. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What were you and Razak doing?’

  ‘Playing.’

  ‘With the rubber balls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While Daddy was chopping the branch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A small gap of silence opened up between them. She lifted a piece of tree, an old English oak, and slotted it into place, aware of Teddy’s gaze still locked on her face.

  ‘Were you throwing the balls at each other?’ she asked without looking at him.

  ‘No. We were throwing them up in the air, as high as we could. Taking turns. To see who throws highest.’

  ‘That was fun.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded cautious. Waiting to hear what he’d done wrong.

  ‘Did Razak throw the ball at Daddy?’

  ‘No!’ Teddy looked at her, aghast.

  Connie found Razak at the far end of the vegetable garden. He was labouring in the shade of the hedge, digging a hole with a spade in a bed of freshly turned earth, his sandals too flimsy for such work.

  ‘Razak.’

  He lifted his head and waited for her to approach. His expression was guarded, as if he knew what was coming. His skin shone darker in the shadows.

  ‘Razak.’

  ‘How Tuan?’

  ‘He’s getting better.’

  ‘I glad.’

  ‘Are you?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘Ya, yes.’

  ‘I’ve come to tell you that I no longer need you to work here.’

  ‘In veg patch?’

  He had deliberately misunderstood.

  ‘No, Razak, I mean anywhere at Hadley House.’

  They stood in silence, except for the call of a mynah bird somewhere nearby. She felt stiff and awkward, angry with him but unwilling to show it. He regarded her for a long moment, his black eyebrows drawing low over his eyes.

  ‘I not bad,’ he said.

  ‘I want you to leave. But have this.’

  She held out a leather wallet stuffed with bank notes. When he didn’t take it or even drop his gaze from her face to see what she was offering, she took hold of his hand and pressed the wallet between his fingers. They felt younger and softer than she had expected. As she stepped back, he let the wallet fall from his grip into the hole in the earth and kicked soil over it.

  ‘Goodbye, Razak,’ she said curtly and started to move away.

  But suddenly he was in front of her on the path, his beautiful features taut with rage. ‘I not bad, mem. You bad. Evil spirits all round you head. Chatter in ear.’ He made his hands into talking mouths, opening and shutting fast, pushing them in her face. ‘I see them,’ he hissed. ‘They lie to you.’

  He swung round and raced away out of the vegetable garden with a smooth, easy lope. Connie stood absolutely still, stunned. Was he right? Could she hear them? The whisperings of evil spirits that haunted this wretched country? Is that what the soft whooshing sound in her head was? She’d thought it was from tension and lack of sleep, but maybe she was wrong.

  As she walked back to the house, her early-morning shadow darting ahead of her like a black demon, it took all her self-control not to flap her hands around her head to knock the bad spirits out of the air.

  Flight Lieutenant Johnnie Blake arrived just after eight o’clock in the morning. His left arm was in a sling across his chest, and he was out of uniform in an open-necked shirt and grey flannels. Connie greeted him at the door with a hug and led him into the drawing room, but when she held him at arm’s length and studied his face, she was saddened by what she saw. His handsome face looked exhausted, with dark smudges under his eyes and a shiny burn mark like a puddle of ice just in front of his left ear.

  ‘What a silly idiot you are!’ she laughed. ‘You and Nigel both make a fine pair of wounded soldiers.’

  ‘Nigel? What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t look like that. He’s upstairs, banished to bed for a few days.’

  ‘What happened? Connie, is he hurt?’

  ‘He tried to chop his leg off with a parang.’

  ‘Christ! They are lethal.’ He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and matched her smile. ‘So how is the foolish fellow?’

  ‘Recovering. Doctor Rossiter patched him up. What about you? How’s your poor shoulder?’

  ‘A scratch only.’ He rolled his blue eyes at her. ‘I’m just damned furious at being invalided out for a month, especially now.’

  ‘Well, I shall keep you here as long as I can to act as official entertainer to Nigel – to make him stay off that leg of his until it’s properly healed. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ he laughed. ‘I’ll wear a court jester’s hat if it will help.’

  ‘Excellent! Run upstairs and say hello to him. He’s dying of boredom up there. Please remind him that I say that he’s not to smoke in bed! I’ll bring you a couple of coffees …’

  ‘Pajits would be better.’

  ‘At this hour? Johnnie, it’s far too early for alcohol.’

  ‘Not today. Bring one for yourself, too. You’re going to need it.’

  For a moment he didn’t move, just looked at her with an expression she couldn’t fathom. Then he was gone, his long limbs and rumpled blond hair speeding through the hall and racing up the stairs. Quickly she mixed three glasses of gin and bitters and hurried up the stairs with them. Nigel was sitting on the edge of the bed, his feet on the floor. She opened her mouth to scold him, but when she saw his face she shut it again. His expression was one of horror. His skin was the colour of old wax as he stared, appalled, at Johnnie who was leaning against the window sill.

  ‘No!’ Nigel bellowed.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘It’s the bloody murdering Japs. They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor.’

  ‘Pearl Harbor?’

  ‘In Hawaii. The American naval base. Oh God, this means disaster for us and the whole of East Asia. They’ve destroyed the American fleet.’ Nigel dragged a wrist across his mouth as if he could wipe away the words.

  Quietly Johnnie added, ‘Seventeen of their G3M bombers have attacked Singapore, too. Raffles Place was hit, sixty people killed and more than seven hundred injured. They went for the airfields at Tengah and Seletar, and the poor Gurkha Rifles took a terrible pounding.’

  Connie put her hand to her throat to hold in the cries that rose like wraiths from her lungs. The evil spirits were laughing in her ears.

  ‘It’s war, Constance,’ Nigel said. ‘We’re at war.’

  They are addicted. The thought darted into Connie’s mind two days later as she looked around her at the men and women in the smoke-filled bar of the Victoria Club. They are addicted to mastery. If ownership of this country with its tin and its rubber and its timber is wrench
ed from their grip, they would lose their sense of who they are and what their purpose in life is.

  Nigel was at home in bed, but in spirit he was here with them, one of the addicts, one of the owners of the rich earth of Malaya.

  ‘The attack on Pearl Harbor signals that the balance of power in the Pacific has fundamentally changed,’ Henry Court announced as he knocked back an early Bloody Mary. ‘But at least it means that the blasted Yanks have stopped dragging their heels. The Japs have forced them into this war at last, with a kick up the backside.’

  ‘About bloody time,’ someone shouted.

  The bar was bristling with people eager to make their voices heard. They had gathered together in tight clusters, around the radio and in the smoking room, herded into close-knit groups like nervous livestock who know a wolf is prowling the fences. Shock had shaken the whole white community of Palur to the core, so that they sought safety in numbers. So preoccupied were they with their own plight, they failed to notice that the natives in the town and around the wharves were starting to vanish quietly back to their kampongs, their villages in the jungle.

  ‘Prime Minister Churchill has appointed Duff Cooper as Resid ent Cabinet Minister for Far Eastern Affairs in Singapore to oversee matters. He’s a damn good man,’ Henry Court reminded everyone.

  Connie sat in silence at a low table with Harriet Court sipping coffee, listening to the men raising their voices.

  ‘We’ve all heard the rumours that the Japs are trying for an amphibious assault up in the north, around Kota Bharu, but if they so much as put one yellow foot on Malayan soil, General Arthur Percival and our 53rd Infantry will show them what for,’ a retired major with ruddy cheeks insisted.

  ‘And he has the Indian and Australian divisions as back-up. The Japanese Army will run like sheep.’

  ‘They have the RAF to reckon with. Our boys in their Brewster Buffaloes will blast them from the skies.’