Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Heavens, I couldn’t begin to remember. We were going down with one illness after another in the beginning. We had no drugs, you see, and we had to eat whatever we could get. I’m a tough specimen and I got off lightly, but I was unconscious for three days once with one of the fevers that hit us.’

  ‘Mmn.’ The doctor examined him as if he could hardly bear to handle another man’s body, putting on a thin rubber glove to feel the inside of his rectum with one finger. ‘Prostate seems a little enlarged.’ He was plainly puzzled. ‘But it shouldn’t be serious. There are no nodules, nothing. This may just be the result of an old urinary infection. Tell you what I’ll do – we’ll assume that this is another of these damn tropical bugs the boffins haven’t caught up with yet and see how it likes some penicillin. Wonderful stuff, penicillin. Takes care of the clap too, yon know.’ Anderson was not by nature a tactful man, but he would not have dreamed of telling James outright that he suspected that chronic, untreated gonorrhea was the major cause of his problem.

  Anderson came to dinner with them and stayed overnight, for which James was grateful since his presence diluted the tense atmosphere between himself and his wife. James’s characteristic charm was waning; it was hard to radiate merriment with sexual failure, poverty, and insecurity staring him in the face. He saw no reason to confide his problems to Bettina. She was already whimpering, ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ and following him with reproachful eyes. They were squabbling with more frequency. ‘You only married me for Gerald’s sake,’ she would say, or, ‘You married me because you felt sorry for me, didn’t you?’ She was terrified that he would divorce her; she felt as if the shame of that would kill her, that anything would be better than the misery of living as a stigmatized divorcee on a pittance – she was no longer entitled even to her widow’s pension.

  James at first argued, swearing with the fluency of lifelong practice that he loved her, but she began to be obsessed with her own inferiority and retreated beyond the reach of flattery. ‘I’m no good,’ she told him, ‘I’m not your class, your family will laugh at me.

  They must be wondering what on earth possessed you to marry some common little woman with no money or family of her own.’

  The doctor returned in a week. ‘Thought it best to pop by,’ he told James, his bald head gleaming with a film of perspiration. ‘Penicillin doesn’t agree with everyone. Besides, I’d like to see how it acts on your condition – very interesting, never come across anything like it before.’

  Anderson continued to make weekly trips to the estate for four or five months, eventually changing James’s treatment to another drug, and always happy to stay the night. James was more glad of his company than anything else. Nothing seemed to affect his body one way or another. He never felt any sexual stirring towards his wife now, and she behaved to him with such coldness he seldom dared to make a move towards her.

  One morning James left the bungalow in darkness as usual to take muster, then realized that he had forgotten to put on his wristwatch. Rather than risk turning the car on the pitch-dark narrow track, he left it and ran back through the silence that preceded the jungle dawn, when life seemed suspended as if a thousand creatures were holding their breath in anticipation.

  James saw two figures in silhouette against the bamboo blinds and realized that his bedroom door was open and light from the kerosene lamp was streaming across the verandah outside. As he approached, he heard his wife’s voice. ‘I can’t bear it when you’re not here, Arthur, I feel so safe with you,’ she was saying. ‘I know I’ve made such a terrible mistake. You’re the only person I can talk to. I just don’t know what to do.’ The rattan lounger creaked as she sat down in a tense ball of distress.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Betty. He swept you off your feet, that’s all. He’s a good-looking chap, a real ladies’ man. No girl could resist if he made up his mind to charm her.’

  ‘But he’s so different now. He’s …’

  ‘He’s seen me about it, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know.’ Her voice sank to an embarrassed whisper and James saw his wife bow her head.

  ‘He and Gerald used to go down to that place called Mary’s in K. L. before the war. Did you know that?’ The shadowy head was shaken and the face appeared in profile as Betty looked up. ‘I think he – ah – picked up something there that’s the cause of some of this trouble. So you see, my dear, it’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You mean, some disease?’ James smiled grimly to himself at her horrified tone.

  The doctor put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘No danger from it now, I’m certain. Cleared up long ago but there’s probably some scarring. But there’s something else, my dear. I should have spotted it at once after all these years out East. Occasionally a man gets accustomed to native women and can’t … well, if he takes up with a white woman afterwards it’s never very successful. There’s some fancy psychological explanation. I’ve seen quite a few men like that in my time and I’m afraid I think James is another one.’

  ‘But he says he must have children, Arthur.’

  ‘I’m afraid he has precious little hope of that at the moment.’

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Arthur. I couldn’t go through all this on my own.’

  ‘Would you object if I suggested you should see a colleague of mine in K. L. for some tests? There’s just a possibility that there’s something which can be done, but we would need to know that everything was all right with you, too.’

  ‘If I must,’ Bettina said slowly. ‘I suppose I owe it to him to try everything.’

  To James’s surprise the doctor sat down beside his wife, his arm around her shoulders, and slowly kissed the top of her head. Then Ah Ching appeared at the front of the bungalow and began climbing the steps, and the two people drew apart.

  James decided to send a boy to fetch his watch later and returned to his office, his mind in turmoil. Jealousy was the mildest of the emotions he felt. Uppermost was outrage: Anderson had obviously deliberately prolonged his useless treatment in order to have the excuse to meet Betty, and had deceived him about his sexual difficulties. Beyond his anger, however, James saw that the situation could be turned to his advantage. For the first time since the end of the war he allowed himself to think of Khatijah and their child. He pulled out the letters from the lawyers in London and read them again.

  Betty found that there were more and more occasions when James could not be with her and suggested she should choose Anderson’s company instead. Swiftly her trust in the doctor grew into a passionate affection, which he returned. She began to make shopping trips to Kuala Lumpur whose real purpose was to meet Anderson in the tearoom of Robinson’s department store.

  She was an easy victim of romance. Impelled by the instinct to find a protector, and with any sensuality she might have achieved blighted by the puritanical ignorance of her upbringing, Betty could adeptly arrange her emotions to suit her circumstances. Genuine passion was beyond her, but instead she felt an equally powerful sensation, an artificial attachment created from equal parts of expediency and fantasy.

  James watched the couple carefully during the doctor’s visits, feeling contempt for their love affair which seemed to him as banal and sentimental as a cheap Hollywood romance. He took a perverse satisfaction in their shared looks and the furtive fingertip touches they exchanged behind his back.

  He invited Anderson to spend the Christmas of 1946 at Bukit Helang. Bill Treadwell also joined them, and at once remarked James’s grim, withdrawn mood. ‘Not much goodwill to all men about you, Jim,’ he said with characteristic directness.

  James rejected the invitation to confide his troubles. ‘Tell me about the prospects for peace on earth,’ he countered. ‘Have the Communists disbanded? I heard on Radio Malaya …’

  The Australian made an expression of contempt. ‘Surely you’re not still believing everything you hear on Radio Malaya?’ They fell into a familiar discussion about the authorities’b
lindness to the Communist threat and it was not until many hours later that Bill wondered why James was being so reticent about whatever was preying on his mind.

  There were electric lights now to hang with the Chinese lanterns and Indian paper flowers on the young casuarina tree which was felled for the celebration, and a frozen turkey from the cold-store in Kuala Lumpur instead of the sucking pig which had graced the board in Douglas Lovell’s day.

  Knowing that the lovers had formed the habit of meeting on the verandah in the morning after he had left for the muster ground, James set off in darkness as usual the day that work resumed on the estate; then turned back to spy on his wife. Again he saw her with Anderson, two shadows on the blinds, which this time embraced and kissed awkwardly.

  ‘I can’t bear it, Arthur,’ Betty spoke in a low, hopeless voice. ‘I’ve never known such happiness and I can’t stand stealing it this way. I want to be with you for always.’

  ‘Leave him, darling, leave him, why ever won’t you leave?’

  Little as he cared for Betty now, James felt a stab of jealousy. The two figures sat down side by side and were evidently holding hands. James strained his ears to hear the rest of the conversation.

  ‘I daren’t run off, darling, I daren’t,’ Betty was saying. ‘Don’t you see what he’d do? He’d finish you. I’m your patient, too, don’t forget, Arthur. If it was ever known that you had a love affair with a patient, and with the wife of one of your patients, there’d be a terrible scandal. The Medical Council would bar you from practising ever again. You’d be struck off, and then what?’

  ‘I could still practise out here – no one enquires too deeply into a fellow’s credentials in the East.’

  ‘But we’d never be able to go home, Arthur,’ Bettina spoke with anguish. ‘I don’t want us to be one of those awful, shady colonial couples. I want to be your wife, and to live with you in England, and have nothing to hide from anybody. I hate this beastly place, I’ve always hated it.’ They sighed and were silent and unhappy for a while.

  James felt a surge of contempt. Like most aristocrats, he considered himself above snobbery, but the petit bourgeois tone of his wife’s love affair disgusted him. The craven preoccupation with professional status, respectability and appearances was anathema to his own values. Much as he despised the lovers’suburban dilemma, however, he appreciated its power to paralyse them.

  ‘I’ve got to make him divorce me,’ his wife said at last. ‘Or catch him out with one of his native women. Then I’ll be free. It won’t be long now, I’m sure of it. If only he doesn’t decide to go home with me. I couldn’t bear to leave you.’

  ‘He won’t go home until he’s got his legacy, never fear. And he won’t get that until he gets his child, which is impossible. So that’s that. We’re safe for a while.’

  Bettina gave a laugh, the cruel expression of a weak spirit’s resentment which ignited hatred in James’s heart. ‘You’re quite sure I can’t get pregnant?’ she asked the doctor. ‘Even if he could – do something?’

  The man nodded. ‘I’ve seen the results of those tests you had in K. L. myself and it’s exactly as I thought. When you were ill after your child was born there was a lot of abdominal infection and, of course, in those circumstances with no treatment it probably continued unchecked for a long time. There’s no chance of the two of you ever having a child. So he’ll never get his legacy, unless he settles for a native wife and a brood of half-castes – hardly the thing for the son of a duke, eh?’

  ‘But don’t you mind about me, Arthur? I wouldn’t mind giving you children if you wanted them.’

  ‘I don’t want them. I faced that a long time ago with Jean. All I want is you, my darling, and for us to be together always.’

  James drew back to avoid seeing their embrace. His head spun with the implications of what he had heard, and he walked back to his car in a trance. Once the morning’s business was underway, he went into his office to consider. Then he called up Selambaram to announce that he would be going away for a few days, and telephoned an acquaintance in Kuala Lumpur to ask for a loan of his car.

  He drove slowly down the straight, level road, red dust billowing from the tyre-tracks. It was like driving into a dream. The wooden houses slipped past, half-hidden by thickets of bamboo. In the fields he could see people cutting rice. Was she with them? He half expected Khatijah’s graceful form to appear at the roadside and walk towards him, the steps confined to a seductive undulation by the tight dark-red sarong. He was afraid of seeing her, afraid of her reaction when he proposed taking possession of their child. Better hope that she was harvesting rice with the others.

  The cindery area of the roadside, where he had so often parked his truck, was waiting for the car. He walked to the house of his father-in-law, conscious of his stiff shorts and sturdy shoes. They did not know him at once, because of his pale skin and Western clothes, but he smiled and joked and reminded them of incidents during the war and at length they saw that he was the same person as the man who had married Khatijah, and greeted him with a mixture of pride and wariness. Here, too, he realized, he had the name of a war hero.

  ‘Your wife is well,’ Osman told him as they sat down on the wooden floor. Little Yusof fetched Maimunah, who arrived with a baby in her arms. Behind her trailed a watchful infant with fine, brown hair, dressed in a length of checked cotton which was tucked around her plump stomach. James noticed with relief that his daughter’s skin tone was no more than olive, that her hair was not black but several shades of tobacco-brown, that her eyes were oval but not slanting.

  ‘And you have another daughter,’ Maimunah was offering him the firmly swaddled bundle in her arms. With disbelief he took it, and looked down on the small face; a pair of dancing, dark eyes scanned him with curiosity. The baby opened its tiny, toothless mouth and yawned. This child was also olive-skinned. He fancied that the eyes turned up at the corners, but could not be sure.

  ‘Born six months ago,’ the grandmother told him. Mentally, he counted the months. Yes, it was just possible. They must have conceived this child just before he left the village. ‘Very strong baby, laughing all the time.’ The tiny limbs struggled in their white wrapping and the baby gave a cooing gurgle.

  He handed back the bundle and began negotiations, impatient with the delicate circumlocutions he knew he must use in order to persuade. He wished to return to his own country with his children, and would make a gift of money to Khatijah and another to Osman. He proposed divorcing Khatijah under Moslem law. Their marriage in any case was not valid under the laws of Great Britain. They had certainly expected something like this, and from the eagerness with which Osman began to discuss the terms of the deal James deduced that Khatijah had once more sunk to the status of an outcast in her family. ‘Of course,’ Osman observed pompously, ‘the Holy Koran decrees that children are the property of their father beyond the age of six. Of course, these circumstances are special, because their father wishes to travel so far away.’

  Maimunah, on the other hand, wrangled with unfeminine obduracy. ‘Khatijah’s children are her only happiness, the only wealth she possesses. She will never give them up. She will fight like a tigress for her cubs.’ She glared around the dim, stuffy interior of the house. ‘Children as young as this need their mother. And besides, no honourable family would entertain such a suggestion.’

  Then there was a commotion among the crowd which had assembled on the ground below, and Khatijah herself appeared, her red and brown skirts still wet from the padi fields. Obviously one of the children had run to tell her that her husband had reappeared at last and wanted the babies. His heart turned over at the sight of her, vibrant with anguish, all modesty forgotten as her headcovering slipped off her braided black hair.

  She flew at him, eyes as wild and staring as those of an angry cat. ‘You shall never have them!’ she screamed, clawing at his shirt. ‘I will die rather than give my babies to you! No other woman is going to bring up my children. They belong to m
e. I love them. My children are all the world to me. If you take away my children, I will die!’

  Uncontrollable sobs tore at her lungs and she began to scream. She hurled herself at her stepfather, begging incoherently to keep the girls, and Maimunah spoke up again, arguing with Osman: ‘It’s not right to take such tiny children away from their mother. It’s cruelty. How will the baby live happily without its mother? Khatijah should be able to bring up her own children.’

  The women’s opposition made up Osman’s mind at once. He had no wish to cut the foolish figure of a family head whose womenfolk disregarded his authority.

  ‘Be quiet, both of you. This man risked his life with the Japanese for us, are we now going to deny him what is rightfully his? I don’t need two more mouths to feed, Khatijah – did you think of that?’

  ‘No!’ she screamed in fury, hammering her fists on the bare, wooden floor. ‘No! No! I won’t let you take my babies.’ She leapt up, snatched the swaddled baby from her grandmother’s arms and ran to the steps, but at once two uncles restrained her and James flinched inwardly as he saw his child torn from its mother’s arms.

  The older girl, understanding what was to happen, began to scream and clutch Khatijah’s skirts, but she, too, was pulled away.

  ‘Take your granddaughter away,’ Osman told Maimunah. ‘This is best for everyone, and she will realize that when she has calmed herself.’ Khatijah’s mother stepped forward, eager to remove the embarrassment of her disobedient girl from her husband‘s sight, but Khatijah halted at the head of the stairs and snarled at James.

  ‘Never forget what you have done today – never! There is nowhere in the world you can take my children that I will not find them and come for them! And I will make you suffer.’

  After that, the affair was finished with the same furtive lack of ceremony that had characterized his wedding to Khatijah. With Khatijah’s mother and one of her uncles, James drove with the infants to Kuala Lumpur, where he sent the villagers back. Then, he telephoned the estate and ordered his houseboy to bring the amah and meet him.