The White Pearl

by Kate Furnivall

  Iron-eyes spread out a giant map – he called it a chart – on the table and everyone gathered around, shoulders touching, eyes jumping from place to place. Nervy as frogs. He pushed his finger over a pretty expanse of blue and jabbed it on blobs of green, some long and thin, others fat and round, bundled up against each other. Then there were pink sections and yellow sections, and strange-shaped squiggles that she knew were writing.

  ‘Understand?’ Iron-eyes checked his listeners.

  Everyone nodded agreement. Maya didn’t understand, not one word. Yet she nodded too. But Razak had the courage to ask, ‘Is the blue bit the sea?’

  Beside her the fat tuan laughed, and Maya wanted to slap him.

  ‘Yes,’ Iron-eyes said. ‘That’s correct.’

  The sea? So much sea? She was sure he must be lying.

  ‘This,’ he said with his finger on a skinny slice of pink, ‘is Malaya.’

  Maya gaped. Now she was certain he was lying. That skinny pink tongue could not possibly be Malaya. Malaya was huge, with forests that were endless. Beaches that made her legs ache they were so long, when she tried to walk them in search of a turtle.

  ‘This is Malaya,’ Iron-eyes repeated, and she realised with shame that he was saying it just for her and Razak. ‘This is Singapore.’ A stubby little leaf tucked against the tip of the pink tongue. ‘And these are the islands of Sumatra and Java. As you can see, they are only a step away.’

  A very tiny step on the chart, so small she could make it without the boat, without even getting her feet wet.

  ‘But that means General Tojo will invade Sumatra and Java as soon as they have taken Singapore,’ Fitzpayne added.

  ‘Just a minute there,’ the pilot interrupted. He shook his golden head and stabbed a finger on the chart, right on the long green bean that Iron-eyes claimed was Sumatra. ‘The RAF has 225 Bomber Group over there with seventy-five Blenheim and Hudson bombers. Plus 226 Fighter Group with two squadrons of Hurricane fighters. They’ll make a decent fight of it.’

  There was an awkward silence in the room. Everyone wanted to believe Golden-hair. The sea grumbled impatiently outside, and gave the yacht a jolt to hurry them up. Maya felt her stomach heave.

  Iron-eyes took a moment to light a cigarette, to look away from them packed around his chart, and said through the smoke, ‘We all know that Royal Dutch Shell Oil has its main refinery in the city of Palembang in southern Sumatra. To seize oil refineries is one of Japan’s primary objectives in sending its invasion forces to this region.’ Abruptly he threw across the saloon the box of matches still in his hand. It knocked against a lamp and made it spit oil, then slid to the floor and hid under a bench. ‘Of course they will damn well invade Sumatra, and your paltry collection of bombers and fighters is not going to stop them, I’m afraid, Flight Lieutenant Blake.’

  Mem Hadley stared at him, and something Maya couldn’t read flickered in her blue eyes. ‘So what do you recommend we do?’

  ‘It leaves us with Borneo – which we think has already been invaded – and New Guinea, a journey of several hundred miles. I am suggesting we take this route,’ his finger crossed the blue, dodging between the blobs of green and yellow, ‘to avoid Japanese detection. We will travel at night. For all we know, the Japs may get there ahead of us.’

  Tuan Hadley was nodding. So it must all be true. Maya nodded too, and darted a look at the circle of faces. Most were transfixed by the paper chart on the table but the new man, the one with rabbit teeth and the fat wife, was gazing around the saloon the way a dog does when it takes possession of a new kennel and cocks its leg to mark its territory. The only other person not studying the mysterious chart was Mem Hadley. She was staring out of one of the moon-shaped windows, her cheeks flushed and her eyes on fire with anticipation. Whatever lay ahead, she wanted a bite of it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maya prodded her brother in the ribs.

  ‘Polishing shoes.’

  ‘You’re not his servant.’

  ‘He feeds us and he keeps us safe from Japanese bayonets. He doesn’t throw us to the sharks.’

  Maya crouched down beside Razak on the deck. He was sitting cross-legged in the cool air of early morning, his black hair gleaming where the first rays of sunlight ran fingers over it. Everything wanted to touch her beautiful brother. Around him in a circle sat ten pairs of shoes, five black leather, four brown, one as creamy as milk. She reached out and touched that one – it felt as soft as a piglet’s ear.

  ‘Don’t,’ Razak frowned.

  ‘I’m not hurting it.’

  ‘It’s polished.’

  ‘Do these all belong to Tuan Hadley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She slid her hand inside one that wasn’t polished, and it gobbled up her whole fist as though she’d pushed it inside a whale. She lifted the shoe, inspected its stitching, its flat, obscene tongue, the tiny air holes in the side, the laces squeezed into a tiny metal clamp at each end. She turned it over and studied its smooth, buttery sole. The shoe was heavy and stank of white man’s sweat.

  ‘Why does anyone need so many shoes?’

  Razak fixed his eyes on her with reproach and removed the shoe from her hand. ‘Because he’s an important man.’

  She leaned forward and spat on one of the polished shoes. ‘You forget, my foolish brother, you forget why we are here.’

  ‘We are here,’ he said, his face suddenly stern, ‘because our mother willed it.’

  ‘We are here,’ she corrected, ‘because I willed it. Our mother cursed this woman who killed her, and her spirit will only rest when we have carried out that curse. I was blind before, but now I have eyes wide open.’ She forced herself to push aside the memory of Mem’s warm, protective arm around her.

  Her brother made a noise through his nose. Maya’s spine quivered. It was the noise of disgust an Englishman would make. He quietly picked up the shoe, wiped her spittle off it and replaced it in the polishing row.

  ‘We were wrong before,’ he said. His dark eyes turned on her an intense gaze that made her shift her position uneasily. ‘I didn’t understand. But now I do. Our mother may have given us little when she was alive, but in death she gave us this gift.’ He waved an expressive hand around the boat. ‘This life. I am learning so much.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Tuan Teddy is teaching me to read English.’

  She felt a snake of jealousy coil around her gut. ‘We are nothing to them, less than ants under these big-boat shoes of his.’

  ‘I am learning to play white men’s games.’

  ‘What good is that to us?’

  ‘White men play their games for money.’

  His words felt like a beetle’s horny back stuck in her throat. ‘You refused to take Mem Hadley’s money when she offered it before.’

  ‘Little sister,’ he touched her cheek gently, ‘your head is still full of river mud. This,’ he gestured upward to the great white sails and down to the shoes on the deck, ‘is what our mother’s spirit has bequeathed to us. She knew when she stood in front of the car, when she felt it crush the life in her and when she uttered the curse, she knew she was giving us all this.’

  ‘Razak, have you been chewing on the crazy weed?’

  ‘No. But I know Tuan Hadley’s mind. He says we have to leave Malaya until the war is over.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘He says a year.’

  She screwed up her nose. ‘He doesn’t know the Japanese.’

  ‘Then, he says, we will go back. He promises to give me a good job.’

  ‘As a rubber-tapper. A tree-milk drinker. You will die out there in the …’

  ‘No. A good, important job. He says he will train me.’

  ‘And me?’

  For the first time uncertainty flickered in his black eyes. ‘You must go where I go. It’s what our mother’s spirit whispers to me. You are no longer sick on the boat, and that shows she is pleased.’

  Maya snatched up the tin of shiny
polish on the deck, stuck her finger into its greasy depths and drew streaks of black down her own cheeks, across her forehead and along her nose. She took hold of Razak’s chin and did the same to him. When they were both daubed with warpaint, she whispered into the delicate curve of his ear, ‘Razak, you forget who you are.’

  24

  The ocean was so blue, and its surface so full of sunlight, that at times as Connie gazed into its depths she lost her bearings. She became convinced it was the sky. Silvery shoals of fish became sunlit flocks of gulls in her mind, wheeling and spinning through the heat-laden air. They shimmered and flashed. Like the thoughts in her head.

  The heat was ferocious today; it hammered on her skull despite her straw hat, and the air itself seemed exhausted. They had sailed through the night, the seas growing heavier, so that the boat pitched as Connie took soundings and Madoc trimmed the sails. Fitzpayne guided them by a chart that seemed to exist only in his head. He wove a stealthy pathway, twisting and turning among an archipelago of more than fifty islands that were hunched and brooding slabs of blackness that loomed out of the sea. The canopy of their dense forests was stitched into silvery lace by the moonlight. Sometimes the belly-roar of a wild animal or a screech from a night bird would ring out and make Connie’s hands pause in whatever task they were performing.

  Shortly before dawn, she collapsed into bed beside Nigel for a few hours, weary enough to sleep without dreams for once. When she woke she found daylight waiting for her and the boat almost empty, only Fitzpayne and Teddy sitting with heads together on deck and fishing with long lines in the swirling blue waters. The others were ashore. Before dawn, Fitzpayne had sought a temporary haven to hide away The White Pearl during the daytime. He had tucked her into the mouth of a narrow river and furled her sails, nestling in close to the thorny rambutans and the feathery fingers of the casuarinas, where passing aircraft would not notice her.

  ‘Caught anything?’ she enquired.

  Teddy held up two fish by their tails for her to examine. ‘It’s a red-tail gourami,’ he told her, ‘and look, a Javanese rice fish.’

  ‘Oh, how splendid. It comes with rice already cooked inside it, does it?’

  Her son rolled his eyes. ‘That’s silly!’ But he laughed, and the sound of it warmed her insides. Too often that sound had been missing. ‘Mr Fitzpayne has been teaching me to tie knots,’ he added with excitement. He abandoned the fish and picked up a length of rope from the deck. ‘Look, this is a bowline.’

  Deftly his young hands tied the rope while he murmured the ritual instructions, ‘Rabbit comes out the hole, goes round the tree and back down the hole.’ He pulled it tight. ‘See?’

  ‘I am impressed.’

  The previous night’s bombing already seemed a long time ago. A sudden shout made her look up.

  The White Pearl’s passengers were playing cricket on the white frill of sand on the shore. The sight of it made Connie laugh out loud. She’d had no idea that Nigel had smuggled bat and ball on board.

  Behind her, Fitzpayne commented, ‘Wherever Englishmen gather together, there will always be the sound of leather on willow. It’s one of the laws of the universe.’

  She laughed, and noticed he hadn’t shaved this morning. Sometimes he didn’t bother, much to Nigel’s disgust, but she liked the way he looked. Unshaven and clothed in an old black shirt and trousers that were turning green at the knees, and a wide leather belt holding a Malayan kris knife at his waist. Always barefoot. Dark hair bleaching in the sun, and an energy in him that defied the heat. All he needed was a cutlass between his teeth to look like a South Seas pirate. A shout of ‘Well bowled’ caught her attention.

  ‘Look, Kitty Morgan is in wicket!’ Connie exclaimed.

  ‘She’s better at catching than the men.’

  Nigel was limping after the ball before it rolled into the water, while Pippin roared in circles around him in a frenzy of barks.

  ‘How is your husband’s leg these days?’

  ‘Improving.’

  ‘Good.’

  For a moment she wanted to tell him that one spot on the wound looked bad, swollen and ulcerated. But she didn’t. Nigel would hate it.

  ‘Why aren’t you down there scoring runs with them?’ She smiled at him. The horrors of last night were being carefully overlaid by a fragile structure of normality: a smile, a game of cricket, a fishing rod. Only Maya prowled alone, like a stray cat at the water’s edge.

  ‘Not my game,’ Fitzpayne commented, and nodded towards where Teddy was reeling out his fishing line again. ‘Anyway your son refused to go ashore.’

  Connie frowned. Teddy adored cricket, but he wasn’t even watching the players. She glanced back at Fitzpayne and caught a momentary softening of the muscles of his face as he looked at her son. ‘He’s finding it hard,’ she said under her breath. ‘There’s something not right.’

  Fitzpayne’s eyes narrowed. ‘There’s something not right with us, either.’

  Us? Did he mean himself and her? Or all of them?

  ‘There’s a war on, you know.’ She raised an ironic eyebrow, and was relieved when he laughed.

  ‘Mrs Hadley, don’t look so concerned. Teddy will survive.’

  ‘Survival isn’t enough,’ she said fiercely. ‘I want more for him than just survival.’

  ‘By his age I’d seen a dozen men die.’ His voice was gentle. ‘It will make him stronger – inside. Where it matters.’

  ‘He won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Let him deal with it in his own way. He’ll come to you when he’s ready. And if he doesn’t, well, then you know he’s learning to grow up.’

  ‘I don’t want him to grow up. Not yet.’

  Fitzpayne’s mouth tipped up at one corner. ‘The eternal cry of mothers.’

  Connie shook her head. ‘He’s still so young.’

  ‘He’ll learn from his experiences. Don’t try to prevent him.’

  Connie studied his face, seeking out the man behind it who had convinced himself that seeing death makes you stronger. ‘So what is it that you think he will learn?’

  ‘How to face reality. Not to run from it.’

  Connie snorted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with running from reality sometimes.’

  Fitzpayne came forward. He didn’t touch her. But it almost felt as if he had, as though a part of him reached out with a hand that steadied her, a hand that belonged to someone who knew exactly what it was to run from reality.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, surprising her.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For agreeing to sail you to Singapore.’

  She stood there, held his gaze and didn’t let him see how much his remark had stung. ‘I’m not,’ she said firmly, and turned away. ‘I must go and see what fish Teddy has managed to hook.’

  But her eye was caught by a lonely figure on the riverbank. Maya had moved to a secluded stretch that was hidden from the cricketers by a kink in the shoreline, and she was stepping out of her bright sarong and kebaya. She stood naked, slight and fragile, her dark skin glistening in the sun and dappled by brilliant pools of light that danced up from the water’s surface. She stretched her slender arms up towards the heavens as though in supplication, then plunged into the river with an almighty splash. For no more than ten seconds she paddled around in the waves before bursting back onto the shore and shaking herself like a dog. Her long wet hair flicked out in an arc around her, creating a brief enchanting rainbow.

  It was too private a moment to linger on. Connie stepped away from the rail and headed over to Teddy, but when she glanced back at Fitzpayne, he hadn’t moved. His gaze was fixed on the native girl.

  In the late afternoon heat, they slept in their cabins. The boat itself grew quiet, silencing its sighs and creaks as though preparing for what the night ahead would bring. Connie dozed fitfully. The air was thick and weighed down by flies, but just as she was contemplating sliding out of the bed and going up on deck, the noise started.

  Soft at first. A
faint moan. A regular arr-arr-arr sound. At first Connie thought it was a sob. Someone crying. She looked at Nigel’s back lying beside her, but it was stiff and silent in sleep. Or was he awake, listening to the noise as closely as she was? The moan grew louder and she thought of Johnnie, of his damaged shoulder, of the pain he never mentioned and the sorrow of watching his comrades shot out of the sky. She sat up.

  At once the regular arr-arr-arr speeded up and a lower-pitched groan joined it. Abruptly Connie knew where it was coming from. Her cheeks flooded with colour and her ears burned, but she didn’t cover them with her hands. She sat there, gazing down at her own pale thighs and listened to the Morgans’ coupling as intently as she would to a piece by Brahms. Twice she looked round at her husband, but he hadn’t moved a muscle.

  Her heart rate climbed as the sounds grew more intense, and she imagined the blood pumping around her body, charging through her veins until she felt the heat of it between her legs and released a whisper-thin moan of her own.

  Madoc did not like the mood on the boat. What was the matter with these people? Bowing like field coolies to Fitzpayne’s every suggestion, putting their lives in his hands and agreeing to be taken to some phantom island where they would be safe for a while. The bastard! He had them eating out of the palm of his hand. What was he up to?

  The White Pearl had set off just before sunset. The wind had dropped and the sails hung with a lethargy that was at odds with the restlessness of those on board. They wanted to move on fast to their destination, the island that Fitzpayne had promised would offer a safe breathing space, even a hot bath and a decent meal that wasn’t rationed on the plate. That was where Madoc planned to make his move. Just the thought sent adrenalin thundering through his bloodstream, and he felt the familiar ache. That addiction to danger, danger that he needed like other people needed air.

  Around them, other boats were on the move, all with the same idea to flee the relentless advance of Admiral Yamamoto’s Japanese aircraft carriers with their strike planes. The sky seemed to have been steeped in blood by the setting sun and it made Madoc uneasy – he could imagine how much blood was staining Malaya’s soil right now. Yet tiny perahu boats, doggedly plying their trade, still darted out to the fishing grounds, and a few sailing boats were still bound for Singapore in the vain hope of gaining a berth on one of the departing troopships. But most were like themselves – scattering outward across the South China Sea to seek safety. Throughout daylight hours Japanese planes droned across the sky, forcing Madoc and his fellow passengers to withdraw into the forest, to clamber over the grasping roots of the mangroves and retreat into its dark world like creatures of the night.