Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  The four eighteen-year-olds, thoroughly drilled in their duty to see a lady home, rose shakily and carried her round to her door, at which instant her husband returned. The woman’s eyes flickered open and she accused the boys of raping her, speaking in Dutch which they did not understand. The Dutchman stomped into his house, came out with a pistol and fired wildly, wounding one of James’s companions.

  The police were called and the next morning James was once again protesting his innocence to his supervisor, who shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bourton, there’s nothing I can do. A scandal like this is something the bank will not tolerate. You know damn well it’s your duty to observe decent social standards and maintain the reputation of the white man in the community. You’ll have to go, I’m afraid. You’ll get three months’ pay and you’ll have to ship home in four weeks or pay your own passage.’

  ‘If I decide to stay, sir …’

  The older man interrupted him with rough sympathy. ‘If you decide to stay, you’ll have a devil of a job finding anyone to take you on, at least in Penang. You might get a Civil Service job if you got your father to pull strings for you in London, but you’ve blotted your copybook pretty thoroughly and you can’t expect promotion until you’ve lived all this down.’

  James’s pleasant features looked miserable and his shoulders hunched unhappily inside his white shirt.

  ‘Don’t want to go home, is that it?’

  ‘Not much, sir.’

  ‘Got a taste for the East, have you? Well, if you think you could stand more, you could get yourself taken on at a rubber estate. Nobody gives a damn what you get up to out in the jungle.’

  A week later a note was delivered to James suggesting that he meet a Mr C. Douglas Lovell at 6pm at the Criterion Tiffin and Billiard Rooms on Beach Street. He found a tall man with thick white hair and moustache taking bets with two Chinese businessmen on the last frame of their game.

  ‘Boy, stengah for my young friend here. Be with you in a moment, laddie, just a bit of business to attend to.’ He prowled smoothly to the end of the table, lined up the shot through half-closed eyes, and briskly sent the balls clicking towards their pockets. The ‘boy’, a sixty-year-old Chinese with skin the colour of a finnan haddock, brought James his stengah, a small whisky well diluted with water. Douglas Lovell collected a handful of dollars from each businessman, the three men bowed to each other, and he joined James at the bar.

  ‘Chap at Honkers & Shankers tells me you’ve had a spot of bother.’

  ‘You could say that, sir.’

  ‘Makes two of us. One of my chaps popped his clogs last week. Cerebral malaria, pretty vile way to go.’ He gulped down half his stengah. ‘Not afraid of hard work, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’ James’s leaden mood began to lift.

  ‘Well, you’d better be telling the truth. I don’t employ any idle blue-bloods on my estate. You’ll be up at five every day of the week, including Sunday. Highest paid form of unskilled labour, my rubber assistants. You’ll get a hundred and fifty dollars a month plus another ten if you can pass the Tamil exam. Got an ear for languages, I’m told.’

  ‘They do seem to come easily to me, sir. Where exactly is your estate?’

  ‘Take a day – best way, steamer to Port Swettenham, train through K L and then it’s about an hour. They’ve promised us a road next year but I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ve got our own club, our own billiard table and you get two free days a month if you want to go down to K L and beat it up. What do you say?’

  James was torn between the feeling that he wanted to be at the heart of the country and to know the mysteries of misty jungle-covered hills of the mainland, and the recognition that a rubber planter was looked upon as something of a social misfit. Although at home he had had no contact with the kind of people who were in trade, and was therefore blithely unaware of the professions which could be considered suitable for a gentleman, and those which represented a definite loss of social status, he had heard men at the Club talk about rubber planters disparagingly. ‘The kind of man that marries a barmaid’was the judgement on the white men, mostly British, who marshalled thousands of Asiatics to tap millions of trees to stack the dockside at Penang with bales of latex sheets awaiting shipment to America and Europe.

  Douglas Lovell, however, did not look like the kind of man who married a barmaid; his commanding bearing and clipped speech said ‘army’as clearly as a uniform. James liked his directness and felt the lure of the unknown East. Only a vague premonition of his parents’disapproval held him back.

  ‘Look, young man,’ Douglas Lovell spoke in an unexpectedly quiet voice, ‘you won’t get a better offer. I’d heard the story of that Dutchman’s wife from three separate people before I left K L. I don’t doubt it sounded ten times worse than it was, but the point is you’re finished out here in the kind of job you came out to do.’

  ‘I know that, sir, but it’s not fair. It was all a put-up job…’

  The older man cut him short with an irritated wave of his glass. ‘Life’s not fair, my boy, and the trick of it is to be in the position to be able to say what’s fair and what’s not for the other poor buggers, instead of having to take another man‘s justice. I make the rules of my estate, and I don’t give a damn what you get up to as long as we meet our latex quota and the coolies don’t shit on the road. Now, d’you want a job or don’t you?’

  James made up his mind in a rush, swallowing a sense of offence at the implication that he would welcome a relaxed moral climate. ‘Yes, sir, I do want it.’

  ‘Good. I’m told your family have a bob or two but somehow I didn’t think you were the type to be a remittance man.’ James was flattered, puzzled and startled as the older man put out his hand to shake on the deal.

  ‘May I ask what a remittance man is?’

  ‘Young fool shipped out East by the family to save them further embarrassment, spends his allowance on opium and taxi-dancers and dies young. Buried one once, found him dead in a shack on the edge of the jungle. Took three months to get the body identified. You’re not that type. Ask too many questions.’

  James was indeed quivering with curiosity about every corner of the new world for which he departed the next day. With his new job he acquired a tin-roofed bungalow built on stilts, on the edge of virgin jungle. At noon the silence was so profound he felt he could hear the vast primaeval forest grow. All day moisture dripped from green leaves and shifting mists mantled the ancient treetops. There was a clean, earthy smell. When he was on his own under the green canopy, James felt as pure as Adam in the Garden of Eden.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Wait for me!’ called Rosanna, running up the avenue of lime trees. Cathy and Monty, swathed in their capes and scarves against the raw February cold, were tramping arm in arm ahead of her. Together, they stopped and turned, two figures dwarfed by the massive trees. Cathy, at 5ft 7in, taller than her sister by a generous hand’s-breadth, rubbed Monty’s bare hands to warm them while they waited. Monty often forgot her gloves, no matter how cruel the weather.

  ‘Hurry up, we’re freezing,’ she yelled in the teeth of the blustering wind. Rosanna, brown curls tangled, caught up with both sisters and pulled a sheaf of magazines from under her cloak.

  ‘I’ve got Swoon, Honey, True Romance and Teengirl.’

  ‘Fab. Let’s get inside before we freeze to death.’

  In the years to come the first thing all three of them would remember about Benenden was the cold. Icy winds which originated from Central Europe blew over the flat Kent fields and scoured the school grounds unmercifully, chilling the red-brick buildings.

  In the winter mornings the tip of Rosanna’s nose would hurt with the cold, Cathy’s toes would be blue and Monty would lie like a corpse under her bedclothes trying to conserve the pitiful glow of her body warmth in the clammy chill of the sheets.

  Rosanna returned from the Christmas holidays with fur slippers and a thick, pink cashmere blanket which she a
dded to the permitted quota of coverings on her bed with considerable guilt. Unlike Cathy and Monty, she had not been toughened by merciless English nannies and lectured about the virtue of sensual deprivation. Desperate as she was to fit in with the other girls, Rosanna drew the line at freezing half to death. In every other way she tried as hard as she could to be exactly like the others. At breakfast she ate every scrap of bacon, conscious that she was being watched. At prayers in the chapel she could clearly be heard singing ‘There is room in my heart for Jesus’. At Christmas, when there was a candlelit carol service, followed by an icecream and treacle treat, Rosanna sang a solo.

  This show of conforming to an alien religion was something Rosanna put on almost by instinct. Her family came from the waves of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Europe over the last half century; her mother still spoke with a distinct Austrian accent. Their aim was to follow the Rothschilds, Prime Minister Disraeli and all the ancient Jewish dynasties in Britain by seeming to be merely English people of Jewish extraction. A Jewish person should not be any more conspicuous in the community than the few acres of wheat which a great banking family reserved for the Chief Rabbi’s Passover cakes were obvious among the rest of their country estate.

  The only concession which the school made to Rosanna’s religion was to allow her to stay behind on Sunday when the other girls had to walk two miles to the village church. Even then, she was so eager to be like the others that she walked through the dank countryside with them, and went to the half-timbered newsagent’s shop to buy sweets and romance magazines while they attended the service.

  They wore thick navy-blue bloomers, called ‘wovs’, which did not quite cover their legs to the tops of their stockings, so throughout the long tramp there was always a band of icy naked, goosepimpled flesh around their thighs.

  At first Monty and Cathy were enthralled by Rosanna’s wardrobe but slightly in awe of her. Rosanna, in turn, did not dare to dream of entering the charmed territory of the sisters’relationship. They were closer to each other than the most devoted friends, bound together by a deep emotion which was like a force-field that repelled intruders. They had no particular favourites among their classmates, but spent all their free time in each other’s company, talking for hours with such close rapport that their conversations seemed to be in a private dialect. Sometimes they behaved as if they were a single person; if Monty was penalized for infringing school rules, Cathy would seem pained by the injustice; if Cathy collected a prize for her work, Monty would glow with pride.

  A few days after Rosanna arrived, the two sisters united in sympathy for her against the subtle rejection of many of the other girls. They seemed to recognize an affinity with her, and Monty, as always, acted for both of them and made the first move.

  ‘Come and join the madrigal society,’ she had invited Rosanna abruptly. ‘I’m sick of being the only contralto who can sing in tune, and they won’t let me be a soprano because there are too many of them already,’ she explained, half apologizing, wanting to say they would like to be friends but shy of making the commitment clear. As the outcast and the rebel, Rosanna and Monty were predestined friends. Their love of music settled the matter.

  Rosanna was conscientious and quiet and the teachers approved of her; Cathy liked her because she was bright, and in the same classes as she was. Cathy had been feeling more and more isolated by the fact that the work other girls found hard she could do easily, and she was glad of companionship in the top grades. No one in the school could beat Cathy at mental arithmetic, but Rosanna came close.

  The rest of the school did not openly reject their first Jewish companion, but they did not accept her either. No one walked with her to the village, offered to partner her in lacrosse or gave her a slice of their birthday cake. They treated her as good English girls treated any other embarrassment – as if she did not exist.

  Halfway through the autumn term Swallow Lamotte was suddenly expelled. Monty came in from lacrosse one afternoon and found Swallow, red-faced and truculent, slamming clothes into her trunk. ‘Just remember, love, they can’t actually kill you,’ she called defiantly to Monty as she ran downstairs to her father’s car.

  ‘But what did she do?’ Rosanna asked Camilla in the darkness after lights out. Even the girl who had talked to newspaper reporters about Princess Anne had not been expelled. Camilla knew but found she couldn’t quite say the words. ‘Elle n’est plus vierge,’ she whispered finally, and refused to say any more.

  There was instantly a storm of speculation which roared through the upper school for days.

  ‘But what did she actually do?’

  ‘Who did she do it with, that’s the point.’

  ‘Do you suppose it was – no, it couldn’t have been.’ The Benenden community included only four men, an elderly physics teacher who scarcely counted as a member of the male sex, a young chaplain who played the guitar, with whom three-quarters of the girls were in love and the two plain-clothes detectives who shadowed the young Princess. It was inconceivable that any of these males would have had a sexual relationship with a pupil.

  As to what Swallow might actually have done to cease being a virgin, they had no clear idea. Sex was a mystery to them, intriguing because it was forbidden, part of the unknown territory of maturity from which they were deliberately barred. Their biology lessons were evasive. Their school books were censored; even the word ‘breast’ was expurgated from their editions of Shakespeare. Sex was taboo; romance was considered harmless.

  By 4 pm, the magazines had been read, swapped and exhausted, and the three girls drooped around the dormitory, suffering the excruciating boredom of the green room of womanhood.

  ‘Do you think people really do things like this?’ Monty thoughtfully reached for her contraband copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover with a frown. They had all read it, especially the page with the word ‘fuck’on it eight times. They did not understand it.

  ‘I’d never do anything like that,’ said Cathy firmly.

  ‘I can’t see Simon doing anything like that,’ giggled Rosanna.

  Because she had an elder brother, Rosanna was regarded as an expert on everything to do with love, a subject about which all the girls lived in a ferment of impatient curiosity. They discussed endlessly the right ways to behave when you were overwhelmed by rightful passion.

  ‘Would you let a boy kiss you?’ asked Rosanna.

  ‘Yes, if we were in love.’ Monty rummaged around in one of her drawers for a bag of marshmallows and offered them to the others.

  ‘I bet you would anyway if he looked like Brian Jones,’ needled Rosanna.

  ‘If he looked like Brian Jones, I’d be in love with him anyway. I’d let him do anything if he looked like Brian Jones.’ Monty cast languorous eyes up at the picture of the prettiest member of the Rolling Stones which she had taped inside her wardrobe. She knew it was her role to shock the others. Pin-ups were forbidden, as were make-up, scent and letters from boys.

  ‘That’s awful. Only an absolute slut would behave like that.’ Cathy spoke with concern and Monty, who had intended to worry her sister, gave a chuckle of satisfaction.

  ‘My mother says you must never let a boy touch you or you’ll be spoiled and no one will want to marry you.’ Rosanna listlessly opened another fashion magazine. ‘She’s terrified I’ll be a tarnished bride.’

  ‘I don’t think you should kiss a boy unless you’re engaged,’ agreed Cathy.

  ‘But if you never find anything out before you get engaged, how do you know you really love each other?’ Monty flicked through pages of tall, blonde girls with smudgy, black eyeliner, posing knock-kneed in mini-skirts.

  ‘You just know, that’s all. I’m sure I’ll know. I’ll feel all swoony and weak, like fainting when he holds my hand.’ There was a silence as the three girls tried to imagine feeling wildly, passionately in love. They couldn’t.

  ‘Let’s try that,’ Rosanna suggested, pointing to a page in Monty’s magazine which demanded
in big black type, ‘Should you wear a mini-skirt?’

  ‘What do you have to do?’

  ‘It tells you – I’ll get my tape-measure.’ Cathy ran off to her own dormitory and came back with the measuring tape she used for dressmaking. She measured Monty’s legs at the thigh, knee, calf and ankle, then did the same for Rosanna; Monty measured Cathy’s legs and finally they lined up in front of the mirror in the corridor and looked intently at their reflections.

  ‘It says here,’ Cathy read from the article, ‘that perfect legs should meet only at the knee and ankle.’ They gazed solemnly forward; Rosanna’s plump legs met most of the way down; Monty’s legs were also plump, but bowed so there was a tiny gap at the level of her knees. Cathy’s legs were perfect – slim, straight and gracefully proportioned.

  ‘But I’ve got this,’ she moaned, twisting around to point to the faint gold impression of the birthmark just above the back of her right knee.

  ‘Do you suppose,’ Monty pulled at the skirt of her unflattering navy tunic, ‘that anyone would notice if we put up the hems a bit? Our legs would look longer. We could do it just a little at a time, I bet Grice wouldn’t spot it.’

  Miss Grice was their housemistress, an unsmiling, ruddycheeked woman who taught lacrosse. Monty called her ‘the Voice of Doom’, because her voice, bellowing, ‘Swing, girls, swing,’ across the muddy pitch, could be heard every afternoon throughout the school grounds.

  Cathy, who sewed the most neatly, took up all three tunics one inch, and the three friends self-consciously went in to supper. No one noticed.

  That night they crept out of their dormitories, leaving pillows under their blankets in case anyone peeped in to check that all was well, and scuttled down the corridor to the laundry room, where they locked the door, jammed towels at the top and bottom to block out the merest crack of illumination, then put on the light. Working in a froth of excitement, Cathy pinned, Monty pressed, Rosanna tacked, Cathy stitched and then Monty pressed the tunics for the last time.