Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  He could see that the older one was taking it harder than her sister. She was looking dazed now, gazing round the room as if she were seeing it for the first time.

  ‘The village is still there of course. I’ll take you to it, if you like. But the family left. The grandmother died, the mother and her husband moved out to Malacca where his people were, then they moved again and I lost track of them. This was, oh, twenty years ago.’

  ‘I’d like to see the village,’ Cathy said, her voice suddenly sounding far away.

  ‘Tomorrow, if you like. Best plan would be to fly over to Kuantan, on the far side of the peninsula, the east coast. From there it’s a couple of hours’drive.’

  As they drove back to Georgetown Monty felt as if she had been released from a prison which had confined her all her life. ‘Of course, of course.’ She shook her head as she drove. ‘Didn’t you always feel it? Of course, Bettina couldn’t care for us – my God, I feel almost sorry for her. Keeping a secret like that all those years, no wonder she hit the bottle. She never loved us, why should she? And do you think Daddy died because the secret was going to come out?’

  ‘Please, Monty, please, don’t let’s think about it too much, not yet.’ Cathy slid wearily from the car outside the hotel and they walked into the empty hallway which mysteriously retained the scent of old wood and polish characteristic of an English country house. She felt unreal, as if she were watching herself in a film. ‘Don’t you want to telephone Joe?’ she asked Monty, suddenly wanting to be alone with the turmoil of her emotions.

  Her sister spent an hour reassuring herself that Paloma had accepted her absence with insulting lack of distress, then appeared in Cathy’s room. ‘You’re really turned-over, aren’t you?’ Monty said, noticing that Cathy was still sitting in the same dejected pose by her window. Her sister nodded.

  ‘I don’t know how I feel, to be honest, Monty. I’m just all confused. Will you sleep in here tonight? I don’t want to be alone.’

  They woke early and drank some coffee which had an unpleasant chicory aftertaste. Treadwell arrived as soon as they had finished, in his own battered Morris, and drove them to the airport. The small plane rose swiftly above the mantle of cloud which blotted out the endless treetops below, and was buffeted by turbulence above the mountainous spine of the peninsula. As it made its descent, Monty peered through the window and saw that the country was almost empty of buildings, an endless expanse of vivid green with a few roads, like gleaming threads, winding through it. There were none of the deep, grey wounds in the jungle made by the tin-workings in the West, and no large, sprawling towns.

  From the airport they rented a Datsun, and Treadwell directed Monty, who was at the wheel, along a wide trunk road crowded with trucks and cars. At the outskirts of Kuantan itself they turned along the arterial road to Kuala Lumpur, then branched off after an hour’s driving. The road they followed was absolutely straight and barely wide enough for one vehicle. It ran across low hills, between plantations of young rubber and oil palms, and they encountered only one car coming in the opposite direction in forty minutes of fast driving.

  ‘Here – turn right,’ Treadwell directed as they crossed a wide iron bridge over a muddy brown river. Monty obediently swung the wheel, and drove slowly along a wide, rutted track fringed with gleaming foliage which rose to a height of eight or nine feet. There were deep ditches on either side of the road, full of rushes whose leaves reflected the bright sunlight like sword-blades. They stopped for a group of half-a-dozen water buffalo who loitered across the road, their grey muzzles lifted and horns swept back as they gazed curiously at the car. One truck, weighed down with massive tree trunks, rolled slowly past them, leaving a choking cloud of red dust behind.

  The natural hedge of vegetation gave way to padi fields, small enclosures of bright green young rice, with a few bungalows grouped at the far side. ‘This is the beginning of the village,’ he told them. ‘Your house is a little further along.’

  Two or three chickens strayed into the road, and again Monty stopped to let them run to safety. They passed the rubber processing plant, where three old cast-iron mangles stood under a rusting tin roof and dirty blankets of latex hung drying on the fence.

  ‘Has it changed?’ Monty asked their guide.

  He shook his head. ‘Hardly at all. People have left, houses have fallen down, the village is smaller than it was, but this kind of life never changes. It’s gone on the same way for hundreds of years. The rubber came, about the turn of the century, that was a change, I suppose. Pull in here,’ he indicated a place where there was a gravel bay at the roadside.

  There was a broad stream beside the road, and some houses, with fifty yards or so between them, which were reached by bridges made of wooden planks. Treadwell approached a woman in a tight-fitting yellow blouse and a turquoise and gold sarong, who was draping freshly-washed shirts on a low, wire line. After a short conversation, he returned to them.

  ‘The house is empty, has been for a few years. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  All the houses on this side of the peninsula were simpler than those in the west, Cathy noticed. They were square bungalows of weathered wood, mostly undecorated, built on piles, with unglazed windows and roofs of corrugated iron streaked with rust. There was a straggling, half-dead pomegranate bush in front of the house to which Bill led them.

  The interior was bare and empty. Monty, oblivious of the dust which might stain her white cotton dress, sat in the doorway and looked down the short flight of steps and away to the plank bridge, sensing the tranquil spirit of the place. Simple people living simple lives had, she thought, created an air of peace there. She tried to imagine herself like the woman Bill had spoken to, hanging out the clothes she had washed in the river.

  Cathy’s uneven footsteps on the board floor echoed in the deep silence of the clearing around the house. To her this village represented the beginning of the long chain of trade, industry and finance. She herself was placed at the far end of the chain, the rich end, the end that controlled the whole length below it. Here in the village most of the people were trapped in subsistence agriculture, their whole lives given over to mere survival. They had nothing to bargain with in their dealings with the rest of the world. They were powerless and expendable.

  ‘The house where we were born,’ she said to Monty, feeling unable to relate anything she saw to herself, or to the memory of her father.

  ‘Did she ever have any other children?’ Monty asked Treadwell suddenly.

  ‘No, not as far as I know. I don’t think she wanted any, she was so absorbed with you, with the loss of you, her memories of you, her dreams about you. And most of the taxi-dance girls got infections of one sort or another.’

  They decided to stay in the area for a few days, and drove back to Kuantan. Treadwell returned to Penang, leaving them with the folder containing a few hazy snapshots of themselves as infants, some old addresses and one or two scrawled notes from their mother. They checked into the Hyatt and spent most of the evening sitting side by side on the long silver beach, watching the waves of the South China Sea, strong and eerily phosphorescent, rolling in and crashing against the steep bank of sand.

  ‘I was happy the way I was,’ Cathy said, her chin resting on her knees like a little girl. ‘I don’t want to be someone else now, and I feel that I’m becoming someone else. It’s as if someone were digging up my foundations; I feel as if I’m going to crumble.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, Cathy. I’m with you, I’m always with you. You aren’t going to crumble, you’re going to be stronger when you’ve taken this in, and happier, too.’

  Cathy had obtained the number of a detective agency in Singapore, and when Monty phoned, a Chinese woman with a reassuringly unemotional manner flew up to meet them. Monty gave her the manilla folder and she agreed to start work tracing their mother’s family.

  After a week, visiting the village every day seemed futile. They decided they had absorbed as much as they could of
the atmosphere of their birthplace, and together they travelled to London.

  ‘So, the return of the prodigal boss. What’s the news on the pearls?’ Henry greeted Cathy with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks as she walked into her office. He was surprised to see that she did not look in the least refreshed by her break but seemed instead to be tense and distracted.

  ‘The pearls?’ She had almost forgotten about them. ‘Oh, the pearls. Nothing, Henry, unless something’s come in while I was away. We discovered something much more serious, I can’t tell you anything about it yet. I’ve got to see Jamie, first. I must drive to Oxford this afternoon.’

  Her son, as she expected, was boyishly excited by the idea that his mother had acquired a secret identity. She did not tell him what had become of his newly discovered grandmother, and played down James’s actions in the process to reassure herself. That’s what I can’t accept, she mused as she drove back to London, I can’t believe my father did those terrible things. I know he was the sort of man who could be foolish and who lacked judgement, but I can’t believe he would be so callous as to rob a mother of her children.

  When she told Henry he gave her a penetrating, startled look and at once said, ‘Take another week off, Cathy. This is too big for you to handle while you’re working. Leave everything to me, I’ll cancel my meetings and cover yours.’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘No. I’d rather work, it’s a relief to have something else to think about. Do you know what the hardest part is? Feeling I don’t know my father, that I never knew him, that he conned me into loving him, almost. I was so young when he died, it’s maddening to think he was gone before I had a chance to understand him.’

  The next day Henry gave her a dusty brown envelope about nine inches square, stuffed with yellowed scraps of newspaper. Stamped across it was the order ‘Do not remove from library’. ‘That’s your father’s file from the Daily Telegraph,’ he told her. ‘I asked a friend to get hold of it for me. Maybe that’ll be some use – there are a lot of stories about him.’

  The file made sad reading. Cathy stayed late in the office smoothing out the crumpled scraps of paper and reading reports of her father’s failed business ventures and visits to race meetings.

  When she began to read the reports of her father’s death and the inquest which followed, Cathy at last found something to add to her new understanding of her father. All the cuttings mentioned his debts. The Telegraph, in addition, carried a paragraph which read: Speculation in the Continental press has continued for some months about Lord James Bourton’s connection with the Paris call girl known as Nadine, who is believed to have been murdered at the beginning of October last year.

  Cathy had moved again, to a penthouse apartment in the Barbican, where Monty was waiting for her. They had agreed to tell Treadwell’s story only to Joe and Jamie, for the moment.

  ‘There’s more to this, I’m sure of it now,’ Cathy said, showing Monty the press cuttings. ‘I still don’t think he told us everything, you know. He was afraid to. Maybe it’s only something he suspects.’

  ‘Daddy went to Paris all the time,’ Monty said, puzzled by the passion in her sister’s manner. ‘The European scandal sheets are always printing stories about me, too. There’s never anything in them. They said I was dying of leukaemia last year.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to fly over and get someone to go through the newspaper archives anyway. Something may come up, who knows. I can’t stand not knowing about Daddy, Monty. Don’t you understand, it’s suddenly as if we’ve got no parents. We can’t remember our real mother at all, and our father was a totally different person to the man we thought we knew.’

  ‘We’re supposed to be going to the Shahzdeh’s new resort in two days, had you forgotten?’

  ‘Damn. Yes, I had forgotten.’ Cathy was suddenly irritated because, lovely as she anticipated that the new L’Equipe Créole would be, she had no desire to fret away a long weekend on business entertaining when she had been seized by a sense that her life was being turned inside-out. She sighed. She would have to go. Both the Prince and the Princess were important clients, and the Princess had particularly asked Cathy to introduce her sister.

  The resort was an island in the Caribbean near Martinique; Joe and Paloma flew out to join them there, which lightened the atmosphere. A gulf was opening between Cathy and Monty: they both sensed it and were the more distressed because the discovery of their birth seemed to be separating them, when it should have united them. Cathy’s attitude was opposed to Monty’s in every respect. She could not stop thinking about her father, while Monty was impatient for news of her mother. Before leaving London, she had briefed a second detective to search for the woman in Paris, and at the same time to pursue the rumours which had obviously troubled their father before his death. Joe made things easier. He took the weight of Monty’s impetuous curiosity, and soothed Cathy’s distress.

  L’Equipe Créole was the sixth of Princess Ayeshah’s resorts and one of the most beautiful. It was a large coral island fringed with natural beaches of pink and white sand which ran gently into clear water thronged with electric-bright coloured fish. The central buildings, of local grey-brown honeycomb stone, were at the crest of the island’s central hill, and the Princess’s guests were accommodated in bungalows in the traditional Caribbean style, with soaring steep-pitched roofs of pale pickled pine.

  A thicket of frangipani had been planted downwind of the central hall, and as the guests assembled for the welcoming reception, its sweet vanilla fragrance was carried to them on the warm breeze. Despite the beauty and luxury around them, both sisters were oppressed rather than soothed by the island. Monty had a sense that she was wasting time on a diversion, and Cathy was unable to relax, and felt her exhausted emotions assaulted by the hedonistic atmosphere.

  Princess Ayeshah was not accompanied by her husband, who had been detained in Paris on business. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved gown of ruched white crépe-de-chine, and her hair, as always, was styled in a chignon which had grown fuller and more shapely in response to changing fashion. She gave Cathy a warm welcome.

  ‘May I introduce my sister?’ Cathy stepped back to present Monty, who shook the Princess’s hand with no more than social politeness. She saw a small, hard, elegant woman with the pallor and brittle sociability which Monty associated with the nightclub world. It was not these days a way of life which Monty admired.

  ‘I’m delighted you could come, I have wanted to meet you for so long,’ said the Princess, giving Monty a formal embrace of welcome. ‘I was hoping we would have time for a private talk before you leave?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Monty said. After all, she had come here as a favour to Cathy, to meet a client of her sister’s who was curious about her. For Cathy’s sake she would accept the Princess’s overtures gracefully. They agreed to meet the next morning. Monty then attached herself to the Princess and followed her as she made her way graciously around the room. Cathy felt tired, unnaturally so, and she soon left the party to go back to her bungalow. There she lay on the bed but could not sleep, tossing and turning unhappily for a couple of hours until Monty appeared.

  ‘Oh Cathy, I’m sorry – I was enjoying myself. I didn’t think that you might not be up to it.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about it all.’ Cathy sat up against the cool, white linen pillows. ‘I keep thinking about Mummy and Daddy, the people we called Mummy and Daddy, anyway. Who knows what they really are to us?’

  ‘Cheer up, Cathy, please. Aren’t you just a very little bit glad that you aren’t Bettina’s daughter? She wasn’t exactly the best of mothers, was she?’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Cathy, who scarcely raised her voice usually, almost shouted at her sister. ‘We can’t say that, we’ve no right to make that kind of judgement, we don’t know anything about her. But Bettina isn’t important to me, it’s Daddy I care about. I can’t accept that he lied to us all those years. How could he look at me every day of his life
and know and never tell us? I just can’t take it in.’

  She fretted sleeplessly for most of the night. At last she slept; she dreamed vividly but could remember nothing, and woke as the birds were calling at the beginning of the sudden Caribbean dawn.

  She called for coffee, and was surprised when the telephone rang almost as soon as she put it down. ‘We have a telex for you, Miss Bourton. It came in overnight. Would you like us to send it round with the coffee?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  The telex was from Mr Phillips at Garrard’s. BINGO, it read, PEARLS ANSWERING DESCRIPTION OF YOURS FISHED JANUARY SMALL INDONESIA COMPANY SAWA TRADING FLORES SUNDA. LAST SEEN IN POSSESSION OF COMPANY OWNER. PURSUING FURTHER ENQUIRIES. PHILLIPS.

  Cathy had again almost forgotten about the pearls, but now her interest revived. She and Monty had tried to unravel a trivial mystery and discovered something far more serious, perhaps fatal to her own inner serenity. The question of the pearls was something which would drive away the brooding clouds of self-doubt in her mind, for a while at least. Her new toy, her portable telex, invited her to action. She sent a message to Henry in London asking for everything he could find out about the Sawa Trading Company, then paced her terrace with impatience, planning to wait until Paloma was awake and she could decently invade the intimacy of her sister’s family.

  To calm her nerves, she put on her new white bikini and the white, crushed silk robe, checking the effect approvingly in the mirror before setting out to stroll to the pool for a swim. A hummingbird, like a flying emerald, was breakfasting among the yellow alamanda flowers.

  The island’s chief success was the swimming pool, a gleaming blue-green lake landscaped to resemble a jungle rock basin, with a high waterfall at one end and ferns gushing from hollows in the grey-black boulders. Someone else was already in the water and, vast as the inviting expanse of aquamarine was, Cathy had wanted it all to herself. She paused, irritated. A woman, also in a white bikini, was swimming lazily where the water was deepest.