Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  After the third whisky James slipped off the bar stool, telling the barman to send the bill to the hotel cashier immediately as he was checking out straight away. Half an hour later, while a maroon-uniformed porter wheeled his bags out into the Place Vendóme, James settled the bill rapidly and took a taxi to Orly airport.

  Within three hours he was at his desk in his office in London Wall, thanking his secretary for his afternoon tea.

  ‘You’ve had an awful lot of telephone calls, Lord James.’ She gazed over the massive mahogany desk adoringly. All the other secretaries in the firm envied her position; James Bourton was charming, kind, good-looking and, at almost fifty, so thrillingly sexy. The other directors were pompous, had spreading bellies and dandruff on their collars; none of the office girls could quite understand why they all subtly disparaged James.

  ‘Mr Hodge from the Allied Bank called three times; he says it’s urgent. Your solicitors have called twice, and they want you to ring back. And a man came in to see you – he wouldn’t say what it was about, only that you weren’t expecting him and he’d pop in again.’

  ‘I think I know what it’s about; is this the rest of the mail?’ The letter from Benenden was on top of a pile that filled his correspondence tray. She nodded her neatly groomed blonde head.

  ‘Now, I want you first of all to go over to accounts and get me some cash.’ He scribbled an authority on a slip of paper and handed it to her. ‘I’ve some clients to take out this evening and the banks are shut. After that, I’ll give you a packet that has to go by registered post straight away.

  ‘Then I’d like you to slip over to Piccadilly and pick up this order at Paxton and Whitfield.’ One of James Bourton’s many indulgences was the finest cheese from the Jermyn Street shop. The secretary looked at the paper he handed her but did not ask herself why a man recently returned from France should order Camembert in England. ‘Don’t bother coming back to the office. I’ll be gone by the time you get here and it’ll be better off in your refrigerator overnight. Give it to me tomorrow.’ She nodded eagerly, and tripped off down the corridor, returning in ten minutes with two thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes. There was nothing unusual about Lord James asking for so much folding money. He would often drop considerably more than that sum in an evening when he was entertaining clients with a taste for gambling.

  With his secretary out of the room, James fumbled in his desk drawers and found a half-empty cigar box. He transferred the remaining cigars to the humidor on a side-table, packed the money tightly into the box, and wrote a card saying simply, ‘This is for you’. He taped the box shut, pushed it clumsily into an envelope and addressed it to Mrs Mae Brown at an address in Bayswater.

  Once his secretary had left to post the packet and buy the cheese, James locked his office door and went back to his desk. He raked briefly through his mail with hands that still trembled and had difficulty opening the envelopes. For some months now he had asked the girl to leave his mail unopened. He opened the letter from the school with agitation, then smiled and discarded it.

  The telephone rang at 5.15 pm, but he did not answer it. By 6 pm, the office was silent and empty, and the street below full of purposeful bustle as people crowded towards the railway stations on their way home. James sat still in his chair, his eyes fixed on the framed citation for his wartime decoration. It was the only thing hanging on the blue, silk-papered wall that was not beautiful, but for once he did not want to enjoy his paintings.

  When his secretary went to open the office next morning she found the door locked. No doubt Lord James had not yet arrived. She called his flat in Albany, but the cleaner answered and said she didn’t think Lord James had come home from France. Alarmed, the secretary called the building’s caretaker, who came up with a spare key and opened Lord James’s office.

  Forty-eight hours after punishing the three girls, Miss Sharpe again sent for Cathy. As soon as she entered the headmistress’s office, Cathy knew that something was seriously wrong; her first instinct was to think that Monty had run away.

  ‘Do you know where your sister is?’ There was definitely something amiss. Miss Sharpe’s normally piercing glance was jumping nervously around the room and her voice sounded half-strangled.

  ‘No, Miss Sharpe, I haven’t seen her all afternoon.’

  ‘You must find her at once. I’ve had a telephone call from your mother. She wants you to come home immediately.’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Cathy was by now absolutely sure that something had happened. Miss Sharpe suddenly looked directly at her and her voice cracked as she spoke.

  ‘There is, Catherine, but I’m afraid you must wait for your mother to tell you what it is. She will be here to fetch you in forty minutes. All I can say is that I am most dreadfully sorry for you both. Now hurry and find your sister.’

  Cathy ran down out of the square, mock-Tudor, stone doorway and around the creeper-covered window bay at the front of the main building. Spurts of gravel shot across the lawn behind her as she raced round the corner, then dodged through a crowd of younger girls packed into the narrow passageway between two wings of the rambling red-brick building.

  At the back of the complex was the music wing, where Monty was sure to be found. Whenever her sister was worried about something – and for all her outward defiance, Cathy knew Monty was worried about what their parents would say when they got Miss Sharpe’s letter – she usually buried herself in the music wing, to play the piano for hours. She found both Monty and Rosanna on the top floor of the stuffy building, contentedly practising a piece of Mozart. Cathy paused for a second and watched them through the glass panel in the door. Her sister’s face, for once devoid of cynicism, defensiveness and rebellion, looked calm and at peace as she followed the line of notes on the sheet music. Rosanna swayed slightly with each stroke of her bow.

  Cathy tapped at the door and they stopped playing and looked up. She went in. ‘Monty, I don’t know what’s up but Mummy’s coming to get us and we’ve got to pack.’

  Within an hour their mother was standing awkwardly beside the Bentley as the porter loaded the girls’suitcases. Bettina Bourton was a dumpy woman with hair dyed a harsh honey-brown to hide the grey. Her mouth was set in a thick, carmine line. Her vague blue eyes, which always had a look of suppressed anxiety, now registered barely controlled panic.

  ‘Come and sit down a minute,’ she said, brusque in her agitation. They sat one on each side of her on a stone bench, watching their mother twist the sapphire and ruby eternity rings which cut into her plump fingers.

  Suddenly, Bettina caught her breath and began to speak, slurring her words in distress. ‘Your father’s dead. His office telephoned this morning. They say we’ve got to go home and wait because the police want to see us. Don’t ask me what it’s all about because …’ She gulped air again then spluttered into tears.

  Numb with shock as she was, Cathy gave her mother a calming embrace and patted her arm, muttering, ‘There, there.’

  Monty sat in silence. She was sure that the school’s letter had somehow killed her father, that her bad behaviour was responsible for his death.

  Then Cathy and Monty looked at each other over their mother’s bowed head, silently sharing the sense of desolation that slowly welled up to swamp their initial reactions. We’re alone now. Don’t leave me, their wide, dark eyes implored each other. I won’t leave you, each responded; I love you, we’ll always be together.

  Inside his office, James Bourton’s body lay slumped across his desk, a red mess where his head should have been. The blue silk-paper of the wall to the left, the leather-bound books in the bookcase, the correspondence in the tray and the blotter were caked with dried splashes of blood and fragments of brain. Clamped in his right hand with the reflex grasp of death was his army pistol. James Bourton had shot himself.

  Chapter Four

  Sour whisky surged in James Bourton’s stomach, then died down. At twenty-two, a hangover felt good. Standing in the cool pre-dawn dar
kness in a white shirt and crisp khaki shorts, he supervised the muster of two hundred coolies with the impression that he was enjoying the masculine pleasures of drink and domination simultaneously.

  His woman was waiting in the slow-moving line of Tamils which stretched away into the darkness of the muster ground beyond the pool of light from the hissing pressure lamp. Selambaram, the conductor, or overseer, called the name of each man or woman in turn and those who were fit to work stepped forward. Each tapper carried two buckets for latex; the weeders each held the heavy hoe used to keep the long, dim corridors between the rubber trees free of the infiltrating plants which tried eternally to reclaim the land for the jungle.

  ‘Is that right?’ James demanded, as Damika, his mistress, impassively answered in her turn and moved away with the kerosene cans she used as buckets; her sari, stiff with dried latex, rustled at each step. James’s finger pointed to the line opposite her name in Selambaram’s book. The neatly ruled double page had a column for each day of the month, and further columns to note the total wage due at the month’s end, how much of the wage was to be taken in the form of dry rice, and the proportion the coolie had requested as an advance on the twentieth day of the month. Damika had taken half her wages in advance.

  ‘It is correct, tuan.’ Selambaram continued to call the roll of the labourers in James’s control, his popeyed, almost black face expressionless.

  ‘Why has she taken so much?’

  ‘You must ask the woman, tuan. I do not know.’ James was suddenly agitated by obscure suspicion, which grew stronger as the woman faded into the darkness.

  At 5.30 am, when the long process of muster was completed, James mounted his motorbike and sped away down the red earth road, riding past the line of coolie shacks and out to a crossroads where he slowed to negotiate the muddy gullies carved by the heavy tropical rain. From the intersection, the downhill fork led to the railway track, the others to outlying areas of the plantation. James turned uphill. The sad liquid whoops of gibbons sounded from the jungle to his right. Soon the sun would rise behind the mountains; a smear of colourless light waxed among the dark-grey clouds, and the voices of the monkeys were gradually joined by the noise of the millions of insects which announced the dawn.

  On his left the rubber trees stood in orderly rows, their slim grey-brown trunks all forked at the same level, their leaves mingling at a height of forty-five feet to cast unbroken shadow over the plantation. Each tree was marked with an identical swathe of scarred bark, like a sarong wrapped around the bole of the trunk.

  On the terraced hillside James saw some of his coolies working. Damika, he knew, would be further down, and he bumped and skidded onwards until the headlamp picked out the turquoise shades of her sari as she bent intently over her knife and cut into the bark of a tree. Tapping rubber was skilled work – too deep a cut would damage the tree, too shallow an incision would not produce enough of the creamy sap to fill the cup which was delicately fixed on two wires around the trunk. Only an inch-wide strip of bark could be cut each month. Anxious as he was, James waited until the woman had made her cut, finishing with a twist of the knife to make a curl of bark down which the white sap would run into the conical metal cup below.

  She straightened her body and pushed the swathe of sari fabric more securely on to her left shoulder, her metal bangles sounding faintly in the quiet half-light.

  ‘Why have you asked the conductor for money?’ James demanded. His suspicion was formless; there was no logic in it. The woman was poor and powerless, virtually a slave, yet she could provoke in James the fear of all her sex which was buried in his subconscious.

  ‘I have earned the money, tuan, and I need it.’ Was her glance startled or guilty? It was too dark for him to tell.

  ‘But I give you money, I have given you a lot of money. What has become of it?’

  ‘The money you give me I give to my husband, tuan.’ Her round, black eyes were, as far as he could judge, amiably blank, as always.

  ‘You and your husband earn good wages here. You have not been sick. What has your husband done with my money?’

  ‘Tuan, he gives it to Chung Li, the labour contractor. We owe him money.’ James, now in his second tour of duty as an assistant on the Bukit Helang estate, knew Chung Li, the biggest contractor in the district, who shipped in the Tamil workers from South India or Ceylon.

  ‘Why do you owe money to Chung Li?’

  ‘It is according to our contract, tuan. We must pay him back the money he has spent to bring us here, on our steamer passage and our food on the journey.’

  ‘How much do you have to pay him?’ James’s eyes wandered to the well-formed, brown arms and the band of naked flesh between the tightly wound waist of her sari and the short blouse that covered her shoulders and breasts.

  ‘We must pay him half of our wages for three years. After that nothing, unless we wish to return home.’

  ‘Chung Li is the son of a dog. He is paid well by tuan besar for finding workers for the estate. I did not know he took payment from the workers, too.’

  ‘Chung Li is a good man, tuan. Before his men came to our village we had no food. My husband and I had no children, because all my babies died. They were too small and we did not have enough to eat.’ An anxious note crept into her voice at the memory. ‘Now I have two fine sons, we eat rice every day, and there is enough even for my husband’s mother. The tuan is also good to us and we are grateful for his kindness.’ Unconsciously her fingers swung the gold metal earring in her right ear, which James had bought her to match the one in her left ear.

  James yawned, his anxiety forgotten, and tasted the bile from his uneasy stomach. His obscure fear that the woman was somehow betraying him had faded with the dawn shadows, and he was no longer interested in what she was saying. The faint aroma of the coconut oil she used to dress her long black hair, and the musky odour of her flesh, drifted to his nostrils. He felt the skin around his balls shiver.

  The woman sensed his loss of interest and her own anxiety subsided. Then they heard a distant whirr; there was a call from the track uphill, and a foreman on a bicycle appeared, pedalling fast. As he approached James, he braked and jumped off the bicycle as a sign of respect for a European.

  ‘Tuan besar asks for you, tuan. There is trouble where they are cutting the trees.’ Tuan was a short form of the Malay word tuanku, meaning a prince, and was the usual form of address from an Asian to a white man. Besar meant big, and tuan besar meant Douglas Lovell, the estate manager and lord of more than all he could survey in this isolated region.

  James mounted his mud-spattered Triumph and roared away. His closest friend among the eight assistants on the estate was Gerald Rawlins, currently on his first leave in England. In his absence James had kept an eye on his coolies, and put in hand the work of clearing a new patch of jungle for planting. This ground was now a mass of felled vegetation. A gang of Tamils was hacking the branches off a fallen tree, another group urged on a pair of lugubrious water buffalo yoked to a bare trunk by rusty chains.

  In the middle of the clearing stood the tuan besar, Douglas Lovell, in grimy, fawn riding-breeches and a sweat-stained shirt. Around him in sullen silence waited the band of Malay contractors who had been hired for the work of tree-felling. Behind them a single tree, its trunk massively gnarled and covered in flaking, bone-grey bark, stretched two hundred feet into the cloudy sky.

  ‘Took your time,’ grunted Douglas Lovell. ‘Tell me what these fellas are getting excited about, will you? They’re jibbing at the last tree.’

  James approached the group of Malays, trying to look unconcerned, and asked for the foreman. A man of about thirty-five, with a coarse, broad face and several teeth missing, greeted him, and James walked with him a little way from the group. Racking his brains for the right way to handle the situation, James began, ‘You and your men have done a fine job. You have cleared this area more quickly than I expected.’

  ‘Good men work well for a good master, tuan,’
the foreman answered.

  Encouraged, James went on, ‘Maybe if I ask tuan besar myself he will give you a bonus.’

  ‘Tuan besar will not agree. We will be contented with the price on which we shook hands, and as we have worked fast the benefit will be ours, and we will return to our village.’

  So this was not a strategy to get more money; James gave the foreman his most beguiling smile and made an oblique request for further information. ‘The questions of the tuans are as foolish as the questions of a child, I know. I myself am scarcely more than a child,’ he remarked in a matter-of-fact tone.

  The foreman beamed patronizingly at James and laughed. James tried to look grave rather than triumphant as the man explained: ‘This tree is the home of a ghost. My men will not harm it, for fear of disturbing the ghost which will come in the night and drink their blood.’

  James nodded and said, ‘The forest is full of spirits and it is foolish to annoy them.’ The foreman also nodded, looking relieved, and there was a perceptible release of tension as James jumped nimbly over a fallen trunk and reported back to Douglas Lovell.

  ‘Damn superstitions,’ the manager muttered, settling his fingermarked topee further back on his head. ‘I’d never have employed Malay labour myself, too damn idle.’ He looked up the vast length of the treetrunk, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the sky. ‘Any suggestions, Bourton? We’ve got to get this bugger down somehow.’

  ‘Well, sir, the Chinese don’t care about the forest ghosts. These men have finished the job otherwise, and in good time. Why don’t we pay them off and see if we can hire some Chinese instead.’

  ‘Damned expensive.’

  ‘If we let the Tamils do it they’ll botch it. And I’ll get a good price, sir.’

  The older man smiled at the slim youngster. ‘You sound like a bloody Chinese shopkeeper yourself. Very well.’

  A few years in the enclosed multi-stranded community of the Bukit Helang estate had transformed James from a weak and wary boy into a man. All the sullen resistance which had stunted his abilities at school in England was charmed away by the challenges of a new environment; he had grown steadily confident as he discovered that his name, his lineage and his wealth were of no consequence to his fellow planters, but his quick mind, sensitive ear and his practical courage were rewarded by Douglas Lovell’s blunt praise and the quick obedience of the men whom he commanded.