‘Your father was a good manager, got on well with everybody.’ Bill stood awkwardly on the broken ground beside the track. ‘After the war, of course, he was a great hero to the Europeans out here. Not many of us stayed behind when the Japanese came and lived to tell the tale.’
As they retraced their steps to the estate house, he told her about the days of the occupation, carefully testing her attitudes. ‘I can’t think of any other man who could have done what your father did. He passed himself off as a Malay, lived in a kampong, took some drug we’d been given to darken our skins. He blended in perfectly. In the turmoil of the occupation people got used to strangers, even in the villages. That was his nature, you see. Mercurial temperament, adapt to anything. The local people knew, I think, but by the time their suspicions had grown they were in danger themselves for harbouring a European and the disguise was enough to deceive the Japanese. We all had a price on our heads in those days.’
Cathy turned the car and drove them back, feeling empty. She did not know what she had expected to find, but she was disappointed that she had felt no sense of recognition in this place at all, even though she had been born here. There was nothing more to see. It was as if her eyes had never looked down this gentle slope of obedient vegetation before. She had no recollection of the place at all.
‘My father didn’t talk about the past much.’ She let the car run smoothly over the bumpy track, then drove faster down the road to the railway. ‘He never even told us what he got his decoration for.’
‘I expect he was keen to get on with his life in England and put the war behind him. Our war didn’t turn out as we planned it, you see. When the Americans dropped the bomb, it set everything we’d done here, recruiting and training men to overthrow the Japanese, at nothing. We risked our lives as well as any other man – more so, given the jungle. Quite a lot of fellas just lay down and died of typhus or blackwater fever or some other tropical disease.’
‘Daddy was always very strong. He never seemed to get ill.’
‘He was a survivor. We both were. He was decorated for an incident after the war was officially over – there were quite a few isolated Japanese units in the jungle who chose not to hear the news. He went to open up a prison camp down south somewhere, and they attacked in the night. Your father was quite badly wounded, but I don’t believe he even knew it. Just fought them all off until we got there to relieve him. Oh yes, he was a brave man – didn’t know what fear was.’
On the long drive back he fell asleep, but woke as they approached the thronged streets of Butterworth, where they halted to wait for the ferry.
‘It’s curious,’ Cathy told him as they stood by the iron wall of the ferry looking out over the dark waves. ‘I feel as if I know my father less now, rather than more. None of this seems to be connected with him at all, and yet it must have been so important to him.’
After years of practice in negotiation, she had a sixth sense of withheld information, and was sure that this man had chosen not to tell her something material about her father’s past. Treadwell impressed her. He was thoughtful and intelligent, not at all the florid boon-companion she had anticipated. But the man he had described to her was not her father. Cathy was too honest to have avoided the impression that her father had been a flawed man, and Treadwell had described a paragon. Perhaps if she appealed to him he would decide to be open with her.
‘I always had the impression that you fell out with my father, or he fell out with you,’ she said with caution, wondering if he would choose to disinter a painful memory after so many years. They were walking back to the car.
‘I think it’s fair to say that I fell out with him,’ the old man said, picking his way on unsteady legs across the metal deck.
‘What did you argue about?’
‘If he never told you, then it isn’t my place to fill you in.’ He opened the car door and sank wearily into the seat. ‘You’re a tough young lady, aren’t you?’ he asked in a pleasant tone as the car bumped over the ferry gangway.
‘Not so young anymore,’ she corrected him.
‘Your sister, what’s she like?’
‘Absolutely different from me. She’s more emotional than I am, more open to people. And she’s always testing, questioning, trying to find better ways to do things, better ways to live. More adventurous than me, but more vulnerable too. She’s a singer, you might have heard of her: Monty’s her name.’
‘Just Monty? I don’t know much about singers, I’m afraid. What I mean is – is she tough?’
‘She’s got a different kind of strength.’
‘Where is she?’
‘America, she lives there. She’s just had her first child, a little girl.’
‘Would she come out here?’
Now Cathy knew that she had been right. There was more to tell, much more, and Treadwell had been sounding her out all day, seeing if it would be right to unlock the past.
‘If it was important,’ she said.
‘You’d better ask her, then.’
Cathy delivered him to the door of his modern bungalow in a small village on the undeveloped side of Penang Island at 10 pm. She drove back past the garish hotels along Batu Feringgi beach, slowing down near the souvenir shops and restaurants which were decorated with strings of coloured lights and thronged with wandering herds of tourists who strayed into the road. The highway twisted along the shoreline overlooked by condominium towers, the milky sea lapping the large rocks below. Now, at last, she had a sense of momentum.
Telephoning Monty was difficult. The line was cut several times and it was three hours before Cathy could get a connection. Her sister’s voice was faint and almost inaudible.
‘You’ve got to come out here right away,’ Cathy shouted. ‘I don’t know what it is but he says it’s important. I’m at the E & O Hotel in Georgetown. Cable me your flight time and I’ll meet you.’
‘OK,’ she heard the indistinct voice say.
‘She wants me to come,’ Monty told Joe, the telephone still in her hand. ‘I knew she would. I should have gone with her in the first place. Paloma will be fine with you.’
‘Are you sure you want to go alone?’ He held her close, feeling protective but also disturbed. Although he tried not to be, Joe felt jealous of Monty’s bond with her sister. It was more than a mere emotion, it was an affinity of spirit which seemed as eternally strong as the force which held the earth in its orbit, and his own love could not compete with it.
‘I feel I must,’ she said slowly. ‘It’ll be awful without you, but whatever this is, it’s something Cathy and I have to do together.’
He nodded. They had not slept apart since the beginning of their relationship. ‘I’ll miss you. We’ll miss you. Don’t worry about Paloma, she’ll be OK.’
When she arrived at the small, hot, crowded airport twenty hours later, Cathy was waiting, a still figure in a black silk dress, and, as she kissed her sister, Monty suddenly felt as if they were children again, facing the unknown world together.
The next day they drove to Treadwell’s house, and sat side by side on the cushions of the sagging teak-framed sofa in his hot, dim sitting room, where the warm breeze from the sea a few hundred yards away barely stirred the curtains of blue and white flowered cotton. At home, Cathy noticed, Bill wore a songkok, the oval Malay fez, which contrasted with his craggy Anglo-Saxon features.
His Malay wife, a thin yellow-skinned woman in a white blouse and blue skirt, brought them tea in thick, white china cups, then withdrew to the rear of the building.
‘What I’m going to tell you is going to shock you,’ he said, looking severe. ‘I’ve thought very carefully about whether I should do this, because it may not be for the best as far as your happiness is concerned. I’m not one of those who thinks we’re put on earth to suffer, but I believe that there’s more to life than happiness, and I suspect you may feel the same way.’ He looked from one woman to the other, absorbing their faces. Now that he saw the younger one he w
as astonished that no one had ever questioned her origins before. The strong, curling black hair, the slightly flattened nose, the slanted eyes – the story was all there to be read.
‘When we met the other day, I hadn’t made up my mind what was the best course,’ he continued, talking to Cathy. ‘But I felt you’d come here with some kind of understanding already. My impression of you is almost that you’re the man your father should have been. Maybe you’ve had a harder life than he did, in the beginning. Jim was my friend, I was attached to him as if he were my brother. But he’d been spoiled, somehow. Not indulged so much, but set on the wrong path, as it were. It was as if he saw the world the other way up. You’re right, we fell out in the end. You’ve got all of his charm and none of his weakness. He would have been a terrible ladies’man, if he’d been inclined that way.’
‘And he wasn’t?’ Cathy heard her voice sound uncertain. She had never considered the question of her father’s sexuality.
‘Not in the modern way, no. Quite a few of the old colonial types preferred native women – I think your father was one of them.’ He looked at them carefully to see if they were shocked, but met the steady gaze of two brown and two black eyes.
‘Are you telling us that he had a mistress?’ Cathy prompted gently.
‘Several, I shouldn’t be surprised. He also had a wife. During the war, when we lived undercover, he married a Malay girl. He was completely crazy about her. I didn’t understand it. She was a beautiful girl, but I thought he was mad, told him so. Of course it helped his cover, no doubt about that. It was a lot harder for the people he hid with to turn in one of their own.’
‘What happened to her?’ Monty felt hot, despite her loose, red silk dress; she tried to imagine her father making love, but no image would come to her mind. It was as if they were talking about another person.
‘He left her flat at the end of the war, never gave her a second thought. I went to see them a few times, gave them some money.’ He paused, wondering if he had chosen the best way to unfold the story. Now that the two women were sitting in his house he could hardly believe it was true himself. ‘There were children,’ he said at last, looking from one to another with fierce intensity.
‘You mean we’ve got brothers and sisters somewhere?’ Cathy felt her pleated white skirt sticking to the backs of her thighs in the heat, and shifted uncomfortably on the low sofa.
‘No.’ His pale tongue moistened his lips and she saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. ‘He had two girl children with this Malay woman. When he came back after the war he married – that woman in the photograph.’ Plainly, he could hardly speak Bettina’s name. ‘Do you know very much about your family’s financial arrangements?’
‘We know that the money he lost was really ours, intended to be in trust for us,’ Cathy told him.
‘That was all the money your father had. He needed to marry and start a family before it would be released. When it was clear that our old life here was finished, your father was desperate. And he found he couldn’t have children with that woman – so he went looking for his Malay wife.’
Monty’s dark, velvet eyes widened in surprise. ‘You mean Cathy and I …’
‘He brought you back to the estate and passed you off as the children of his new marriage. False birth certificates, the lot. I never thought he’d get away with it. Obviously, he did.’
‘So we aren’t … we aren’t Bettina’s children, his wife’s children, at all?’ They looked at one other at the same instant and drew together, clutching each other’s arms; then they looked back at him, questioningly.
‘British law didn’t recognize his first marriage. There’ll be a record at the mosque, perhaps. Did you ever … did no one ever say anything about it?’
They shook their heads. ‘I don’t believe the rest of the family knew. My grandmother was a very difficult woman, but my father was her favourite and she could never keep any kind of secret. If she knew anything, she’d have let it out one day.’
‘Your mother – Betty, the woman you thought was your mother …’
‘She never told us anything. She never even told us where babies come from, let alone anything about ourselves.’ Monty had never stopped hating Bettina, and now she felt an enormous sense of release. ‘I didn’t get on with her, you see. I used to dream of something like this.’
Cathy nodded agreement. ‘All we ever had was this feeling that we didn’t belong, that we were different somehow.’
‘Well.’ He gave a gentle smile, looking from one face to the other, seeing that they had not yet fully absorbed the impact of what he had told them. ‘Now you know that you really are different.’
‘So what was she like, our real mother?’ asked Monty.
‘Sweet little thing. Worshipped the ground below his feet. Enchanting. Like a little cat.’ She saw that Treadwell’s red-rimmed eyes were glistening. ‘She used to break my heart, asking me when he was going to come back. And she loved you so – of course, all the Malays love children, but she adored you, just adored you.’ He looked away through the window at the sparkling sea and the misty horizon.
‘I hit him when I found out what he’d done. I’ll never forget coming up to the bungalow and there you both were, in all the little white togs they used to do up their babies in in those days. And you,’ again he spoke to Cathy, ‘at that age you were the image of him. I realized at once. Went straight in and floored him, broke one of his teeth. I couldn’t have anything to do with him, after that. I went straight down to see her and she was in a terrible state. The whole family was arguing about whether to get the doctor for her – not a real doctor, the medicine man they call in to deal with evil spirits. She was just lying there, eyes open, not seeing anything, as if she was in a trance. She was ill, just skin and bone, she had a fever of some sort, but they weren’t interested in that, they were afraid some ghost had taken possession of her. Only the grandmother was prepared to accept she was ill.’
He sighed and took a mouthful of his tea, which was almost cold. The sisters sat in silence as he continued, ‘It wasn’t the best situation for her. Her mother was a selfish woman, she’d been left by the girl’s father – incidentally, they said he was a white man, English-speaking but not from England – and frankly she just wanted to get rid of her however she could. I took the girl to a hospital, and the grandmother with her. And I made sure she got the money, or what was left of it: your father had paid them off. It took about three months before she was better, and then she decided to go and seek her fortune in Singapore. She had some idea of being an amah in an English family and then getting him to take her on in his household so that she could be with you that way.’
Cathy sat in silence, oddly aware of the waves splashing on the distant, purple rocks. She remembered the anguish she had felt at being parted from Jamie when he was a baby, and tears of sympathy for the mother she had never known pricked her eyelids.
‘Don’t blame him,’ Treadwell said suddenly. ‘I blamed him, but really he couldn’t help himself. In some things your father just couldn’t tell right from wrong. I don’t think he ever really knew what a terrible thing he’d done. He was like a coolie, you know. You couldn’t ever get through to the coolies not to lie, or steal or cheat on their quotas or do their work right. That kind of morality was a luxury to them, a luxury they couldn’t afford. No sense in being a fine individual if someone else owns you, is there? Your father was just the same about women. He’d been made use of, I guess, by his family, somehow. I’d argue with him, but he couldn’t see what I was on about.’
He blew his nose in a large white handkerchief, then reached for a worn document-case on the chequered cloth that covered the table, and handed it to them. Cathy took the heavy leather folder from him. ‘That’s the journal I kept during the occupation. You might be interested to read it.’
‘What happened to her when she went to Singapore? Where is she now?’ Monty pressed him. He looked away, unwilling to continue and afrai
d of their reaction.
‘We should know,’ Cathy urged him in even tones. ‘Even if you think we might not thank you for telling us.’
‘Well, you may not thank me, but there it is. You’re right, you must know. She was tricked, trapped by a few Chinese who ran a cheap dance hall, and she became what they called a taxi-dancer. Little better than a prostitute really. A lot of the girls who were abandoned by Europeans drifted to the towns and ended up that way – the Malays are very strait-laced and their families wouldn’t take them back. Then she began to change, she got hard, eaten up with hatred, obsessed with getting money from the British soldiers – there were thousands of them in Singapore then.’
‘You kept in touch?’ Cathy enquired.
‘For as long as I could. She used to ask me for news of you, she’d lap up any little detail I could tell her. I brought her photographs. He never knew, or he’d have tried to stop me. Then she took up with a Eurasian boyfriend, regular lounge-lizard, and started running with the fast set in Singapore. Your father left when the Emergency started, took you back to England, and shortly afterwards she persuaded this man to take her to France. They planned to open a nightclub in Paris.’
There was a worn manilla folder on the table, and he opened it, sorting through the few scraps of paper it contained. Slowly he selected a narrow, blue card and passed it to Cathy. It bore the name ‘Le Bambou’in white pseudo-Chinese lettering. She turned it over and saw some smudged, barely legible writing. ‘We are a great suces. Soon I can get my children. My thank to you for everthing,’ it read, above an elaborately scrawled signature.
‘She could barely write,’ he said. ‘That was the last I heard of her.’
‘How terrible,’ Cathy turned the card over again then passed it to Monty. ‘She must have suffered terribly. How could our father have done such a thing?’
‘He didn’t really believe she was an ordinary human being, with real human feelings – finer feelings than his own, as it turned out. The British Empire was built on the belief that the natives weren’t full members of the human race, don’t forget.’
Pearls Page 73
