by Rosanna Ley
Again, Eva was reminded of her grandfather. He too had left England because he was an explorer and because he didn’t want to join the family firm. But in his case, the war had changed everything. He had returned to Dorset when it was over and tried to rescue Fox and Forsters, but although he’d had some degree of success and the company had recovered to fight another day, Eva knew for a fact that her grandfather’s heart had never been in it. He had left his heart, she supposed, in Burma.
‘But your father became a furniture maker anyway?’ she asked Ramon.
‘Yes.’ He nodded and swung the steering wheel to the left to follow the bend in the road. ‘He had trained in London and always loved to work with wood. Very soon, he formed a Burmese furniture company with the same ethics as his father’s.’
‘Which were?’
‘We pride ourselves on being environmentally conscious,’ he said. He paused and accelerated smoothly to overtake a small truck. The journey was taking no time, already they were descending towards Mandalay, the sun low in the sky, visible through the trees to the west. ‘We use only the best teak wood sourced from conscientious dealers with legitimate concessions.’
Eva was impressed. His words struck a chord with her own thoughts and values. ‘But what happened to the business when your father—’
‘Died?’ He glanced across at her. ‘My father had a loyal manager who has only recently left us to retire. He trained me and taught me the skills necessary to take over. From when I was only a young boy, it was always expected that I would grow up and take charge of the company.’
‘And you did,’ murmured Eva.
‘And I did.’ He braked at the junction and took the turning to the city. ‘Each generation has a responsibility,’ he continued. ‘To develop the business as he sees fit, but to also remain loyal to the original ethos of producing high quality and hand-crafted furniture. To move forwards, but gradually and faithfully.’ Once again, he glanced across at her. ‘It is our way.’
‘And your method is through expansion?’ She recalled what he’d told her before, his dream of exporting his furniture to the UK and elsewhere.
‘Not just expansion.’ He shook his head. ‘That is important, yes. But I have my own ideas too. You will see if you visit the factory.’
‘I’d like to.’ Eva was intrigued. ‘Did your father try to merge his company with your grandfather’s in the UK?’ Had that been a possibility back then?
Ramon shook his head. ‘They never had the chance to try,’ he said. ‘My English grandfather died only a year after my father arrived here. His heart, too, was not strong. There was, what do you say?’
‘A family history?’
‘Exactly.’ He nodded. ‘The company in Britain was terminated. It was even more important then for my father to make our business a success. He must continue his father’s work. Now he was doing it for him and for his new family too, for us. And I must do the same.’
‘I see.’ She was certainly beginning to understand where Ramon’s ambition came from and why the furniture company was so important to him. It was a legacy, a family tradition.
‘And you?’ Ramon asked as they entered the suburbs of the city. ‘You have antiques to view in Mandalay?’ His voice was a little cooler, but thankfully he was less antagonistic than before.
‘I have.’ She watched him negotiate the busy road. ‘But we’re not depriving your country of anything iconic or culturally significant, you know,’ she said. She twisted her daisy ring around her little finger as she spoke.
‘Is that so?’ He flicked back the wing of dark hair from his forehead. ‘But who is to say? You?’ He swerved to avoid a cyclist and sounded the horn of the car. ‘Forgive me, Eva, but you are not Burmese, even though you may be an expert.’
‘We are taking what the Burmese wish to sell,’ she insisted. ‘And we only buy from the legal owners. What’s wrong with that?’ Eva tried to control her rising anger. He was questioning her integrity, which she prided herself on more than anything.
Ramon braked sharply as a pedestrian loaded with watermelons stepped into the road. He swore under his breath. ‘But why do they want to sell? Have you asked yourself that? Have you thought that perhaps they need to sell because they are desperate? Why not leave things where they are sometimes?’
‘You can’t take away people’s right to sell their own possessions.’ Though Eva knew it wasn’t quite as simple as that. ‘And anyway, lots of the things we buy came originally from the British.’
‘Ah, the British.’ His lip curled. ‘Well, that is your history, Eva.’
‘Your father was British too,’ she said.
‘Yes, and my mother was Burmese.’
Eva sighed. He was quite impossible. ‘We are at least bringing money into your country.’
Ramon conceded this with a small nod. ‘And we are grateful,’ he said with some sarcasm. ‘Just as we are grateful that the US has been good enough to lift some of the harmful sanctions against us.’
‘Ramon—’
The tyres squealed as they drew up outside her hotel.
Eva didn’t wait for him to open her door. She got out and practically dragged her suitcase out behind her.
‘I apologise.’ Ramon was standing in front of her, blocking her pathway to the hotel’s swing door, long-limbed and with a determined look in his green eyes. ‘It is your business. I must not interfere.’
‘It’s alright.’ Eva had to concede that he had a point. And she would do what she could to ensure that everything she accepted for the Emporium had been checked and deemed appropriate for export.
‘Perhaps in a day or two, you will be free to do some sightseeing,’ he suggested.
‘I hope so.’ Eva watched as he picked up her case and took it into the foyer, went in after him and gave her name to reception.
‘Ah, madam, you have two messages,’ the receptionist told her, checking a pigeon-hole. She handed Eva two slips of paper.
One was written neatly and signed Klaus, she’d read that later. The other was from her contact in Mandalay, giving a phone number and the words: it is ready for the view.
‘It looks as if you will be busy tomorrow,’ Ramon murmured.
‘Yes.’ She smiled up at him. ‘But thanks for bringing me back to Mandalay. I’m very grateful.’
‘It was nothing.’ He handed her case over to the porter. ‘And at the weekend?’
‘The weekend?’
‘I can take you to visit Sagaing and Inwa, if you wish,’ he said. ‘They are special places. You must see more of our country to fully understand.’
Eva hesitated. Had his grandmother dictated that this was how he should behave? Or did it come from the heart? ‘I’m sure you’re very busy,’ she hedged.
‘Not really.’ He shrugged. ‘I would like to take you, to show you,’ he said. He certainly seemed sincere. And again, he fixed her with that long, considering look of his.
‘Then, yes. Thank you. I should be free at the weekend.’ It would give her the chance to find out more about the location of the missing chinthe, and what exactly Ramon was planning to do to get it back. It would fulfil her promise to Maya to try and discover what was troubling her grandson. And it would help her to get to know this country even better. Which, more than anything, was what Eva wanted to do.
CHAPTER 24
She had found her. Eva had found her.
Lawrence watched his daughter bustle around the bedroom, tidying up things that really didn’t need tidying up. They had Mrs Briggs for that.
But, ‘Take a few days off, Mrs B,’ Rosemary had said to her yesterday. ‘I’ll look after everything here.’
Him, she meant. Look after him. It made Lawrence feel like standing on top of the bed and shouting. I’m here, don’t you know? I can look after myself. I always used to look after you.
But that was then. How could he look after anyone now? How could he even stand on top of the bed, come to that? It was as much as he could do to get out of
bed and get to the bathroom.
‘Leave it, Dad,’ Rosemary said when he tried to do anything. ‘Let me.’
He’d only be tidying a book away or hanging up his dressing gown. Nothing really. But he realised that she wanted to do those things, it was important to her. She wanted to feel useful. So he let her.
She wouldn’t stay, though. He knew she wouldn’t stay because she didn’t live here anymore. He was sure of that, but for a moment it had slipped his mind where she had gone to.
And then Eva had telephoned from Burma. She had found her and Maya was alive and well. Lawrence had sunk his head back into his pillows that night and he was back there. Simple. He was back there and he could smell once more the jasmine in the porch outside her father’s house, the coconut oil in her hair.
Upper Burma, 1937
Lawrence had returned to the camp. It wasn’t much more than a forest clearing, a few huts with bamboo screens and thatched roofs for the timbermen surrounding the rear of the tai, a wooden house erected on a wooden platform and built on stilts, where, as Forest Assistant in charge of the camp, Lawrence lived. But he couldn’t get her out of his head. Maya. She was the lightest of shadows in his daytime and his compelling silhouette after dark. And he could have stayed longer in Mandalay, because still the rains didn’t come.
It had only been one night but their love-making had been a revelation. She had kept a lamp burning low and she had made him wait while she massaged his neck and shoulders with oil and kissed a trail from his lips down to his belly.
At last, with a groan, he could stand it no more and he had held her tightly and entered her with a passion he could barely control. The connection between them was immediate, electric.
‘Touch me with your lips,’ she said. And Lawrence remembered something Scottie had said to him, there’s no Burmese word for ‘kiss’.
So he kissed her throat, her hair, her mouth. Deep liquid kisses such as he had never experienced before. Lawrence had shuddered as he held her and he had felt her shudder too.
Later, he watched her sleep and it seemed her whole body was bathed in peace. Already he wanted her again and she opened her eyes as if she knew. Lazily, she arched her back like a sleek cat, moved towards him, her gaze fixed on his face.
‘Maya,’ he whispered.
*
Before Lawrence had left Mandalay, he had tried again to tell Maya about his life in England and Helen, about what was expected of him. He didn’t want to pretend with her, he didn’t want to simply leave one day and for her father to say: I told you so. He never meant to stay. He just wants to seize all our country’s riches and then leave, like all the rest.
She turned on him, almost fierce. ‘You owe me nothing,’ she said. ‘Nor I, you.’
‘But Maya—’ That wasn’t what he had been trying to say.
‘We have lain together in my bed,’ she said. ‘And we have talked. That is all.’
He took her arm. ‘That is not all.’
She acknowledged this with a small nod. ‘We are from different lives,’ she said. ‘And we do not have to say that we will always be together. We are together now. That is all that matters.’
‘Are we together now?’ He felt eager like a child. Because he could hardly bear to have her like this and then leave. ‘Are we? Can we be together again?’
‘I will come to my aunt’s house in Sinbo,’ she said. ‘Do not fear.’
Do not fear. With her, he had no fear. Better than that. With her he had a hope, more than he had ever known.
*
Now, Lawrence paced the tai and he walked around the camp. He climbed up the ladder and stood on his verandah, which gave him a very good view of the surrounding area, shaded by the vines grown around the structure for that purpose. As the sun set across the distant valley, he poured himself a whisky, sat on his chair outside, lit a cigarette and tried to relax. But he could not.
Desperate for something to take his mind off his need for her and his need for rain, he decided to visit a small village upstream from the camp where the logging of next season’s out-turn was going on. He would go tomorrow to check on progress. Why not? There was nothing he could do here for now. And he was on a knife-edge just waiting.
He arrived the following day to find that the logging there was going to schedule. It was soothing to discover this, despite the heaviness of the heat and the tension of anticipation.
‘The rain comes,’ one of his men told him.
What was so different about tonight, he wondered. It was hot, as usual. The insects were persistent, as ever. There was no cloud to be seen, just a haze of heat that lifted only at sunset. And what a sunset. Even Lawrence, with so much on his mind, had to admit that the view was glorious. The darkening sky seemed shot with gold and amber as the blush filled the entire heavens over the forest. He sat there with his whisky long after he should.
And then he felt something change. There was a weightlessness in the air, a sharpening of the senses and he knew what this meant. His man had been right. Lawrence was impressed. He went inside as the sky grew black, the wind blew and he could hear the thunder beginning to rumble. At last. Lawrence went to bed, still with the ache that he’d felt since meeting Maya, but at least feeling optimistic. And the rains came.
Even as he was falling asleep, he heard it. Rain, welcome rain, pattering at first on the roofs, getting louder and louder, sending him off into a deep sleep which included dreams of great rivers rising, logs tumbling and crashing downstream. And Maya.
In the morning the coolness of the temperature was another welcome relief after the heavy oppression of the past weeks. But now Lawrence had to get back to camp urgently. The paddy fields were awash and the two men he had sent ahead rushed back to tell him the news. There was flash flooding. The road back to camp was already impassable. Bloody hell. The rains had remained ferocious all through the night and even now they hadn’t eased. Talk about one extreme to the other. The men were saying that the rivers had risen quicker than they’d ever known before.
He waited another day, but the rains didn’t even stop to catch breath. The incessant croaking of the bullfrogs was unnerving him. Lawrence took stock. He only had stores for a few days, but he mustn’t panic. Still, the bungalow was built on low-lying ground and reports were already reaching him that all streams were in full spate so that not even elephants could ford them and that houses were being washed away, so great were the sudden floods. It was looking serious. Was he going to be marooned here? Or was the very water that he’d longed for going to snatch everything away? Nothing else for it. They had to get back – and fast.
The usual way back to camp involved crossing two large streams and it was clear this would be impossible. They’d have to go the long way round. There were still chaungs, but they were small ones, at least for the moment.
Not so small, it turned out. The first one was almost waist deep as they waded across and the current was swift. But they did it. The second fazed even the elephants. They screeched and bellowed at the sight of the raging torrent which was already uprooting trees and crashing them into the banks. Jesus. Lawrence shouted the order to the oozies, the elephant handlers, and the others to move upstream, though it was hard to even make himself heard with all the racket going on, and eventually they found a safer place to cross.
It was still hairy and there was only one way to do it. Halfway across, clinging on to his elephant, hoping they could avoid the debris being flung by the wild waters of the river into their path and praying they’d make it across, the elephant stumbled and Lawrence slipped and almost fell from its back. The driving rain was in his face, in his eyes, in his ears. He could barely see and all he could hear was the thundering of the river, all he could feel was the ponderous movement of the great beast on whom his life depended, trudging through the mud and waters of the chaung. Lawrence clung on with wet, numb fingers, regained his position on the elephant’s back, thought of Maya’s father. He was going to get his hands dirty toda
y, alright. And more.
But at last they were over. Luck had been on their side that day. They stopped for breakfast, completely done in. They scraped the leeches off their legs since the puttees hadn’t stopped the buggers getting through. But they had no choice. They had to go on. And on they went. At times the path wasn’t visible and there was a lot more wading to be done before they eventually arrived back at the camp, wet through and exhausted.
Only then could Lawrence relax. He thought of Maya. She would be coming up to Myitkyina to her aunt’s house in Sinbo in a few days and he would see her again. She seemed to want that as much as he. And then perhaps, he told himself, the ache would go away.
CHAPTER 25
The Emporium’s contact in Mandalay was the main agent for all their dealings in Myanmar; his other men in Yangon and Bagan were apparently answerable to him. This, Eva found out within five minutes of arriving at his ‘office’, a dusty shack in downtown Mandalay on Eighty-fourth Street near the stone carvers’ workshops in Kyauksittan. His name was Myint Maw, he talked very fast and he was extremely full of his own importance. Jacqui had warned Eva in her latest email. You can be firm with him … But don’t push him too far. If he gets at all funny with you, just walk away. Funny with her? It sounded to Eva as if Jacqui were expecting her to walk a tightrope as far as diplomacy and tact were concerned.
‘Now, what I can show you? What I can show you?’ He shuffled through the heap of papers on his desk. ‘What we have? What is to view?’
He seemed very disorganised. ‘This is what I am expecting to see,’ Eva said resolutely, consulting her own paperwork. ‘Figures and statues, carved and painted.’ She showed him the pictures of the delicately carved angel, the nats, the monk sitting on a lotus flower and the Buddhas.
‘Ah.’ He pressed his skinny hands together. ‘So special, yes?’
‘I hope so.’ Eva picked up her bag. ‘Shall we go?’ She was determined to be businesslike and, with this in mind, had worn loose linen trousers and a smart silk jacket for the encounter. But she was getting awfully hot already.
