Return to Mandalay

by Rosanna Ley

  While they were waiting for dessert, Eva leaned closer towards him. ‘I had no idea that the Li family also owned a furniture company,’ she said. She tried to keep her voice nonchalant; this would certainly be another touchy subject.

  Ramon ran a finger around the rim of his wineglass. He had allowed himself only one glass, she noted. After a moment, he looked up. ‘Not just furniture,’ he said. ‘Statues, too. Wooden models, Buddhas, you name it. If they can make money out of it, they will produce it.’

  ‘So they have a factory here in Mandalay? A showroom?’ Eva wondered if she had already unknowingly visited it.

  ‘Eva …’

  Their dessert arrived, semolina cake with fresh coconut milk, a Burmese speciality, Ramon told her. Eva tasted it. It was very different from the unpalatable and bland substance she remembered from school.

  ‘I’m not asking where it is,’ she protested.

  ‘Very well.’ He dipped a spoon into the pudding. ‘Then, yes. They do have a showroom – a shop – and there is a factory behind.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘But you must promise me …’

  ‘Yes?’ She adopted her most innocent look.

  ‘That you will stay away.’

  Eva finished up her dessert. ‘How can I go there, Ramon?’ she asked. ‘I don’t even know where it is.’

  They had coffee and Eva was surprised to see, when she looked at her watch, that it was almost midnight.

  ‘I will take you back to your hotel,’ Ramon said. He had paid the bill already and pretended to be offended when she offered a contribution.

  Outside, the darkness enveloped them, but the air was balmy and still. Eva was aware of the scent from the jasmine in her hair. And of Ramon, as he opened the door of the car and she slid silently into the leather interior.

  *

  At the hotel, he walked her towards the foyer. But just before they reached the swing door, he drew her to one side. ‘Thank you for coming to dinner with me tonight, Eva,’ he said. His voice held a low intimacy. Gently, he touched her hair.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about the company, Ramon,’ she said. She took a step closer, put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sure it will survive the competition and end up even stronger and more successful than before.’

  ‘I have misjudged you, Eva.’ He looked deep into her eyes. ‘I thought you had come here to interfere, cause trouble and upset my grandmother all over again. But that is not true. You have only come here for the sake of your grandfather. I wanted to blame you for all sorts of colonial wrongs. I was mistaken.’

  Eva waited. The tension was palpable between them she felt as if she were balancing on a knife edge.

  ‘In a day or two, my grandmother will be coming here to Mandalay,’ he murmured, drawing her closer, whispering into her hair. ‘And when she does—’

  ‘Eva!’

  She spun around. Who would know her, here of all places?

  A blond head and broad shoulders. An air of suave confidence. Klaus was halfway through the swing doors of the hotel. ‘Hey, Eva! Hello!’

  She felt Ramon stiffen beside her and take a step away.

  ‘Klaus. Hello. I did try and phone you.’ Eva forced a welcoming smile. She wasn’t unhappy to see him, but his timing was atrocious. What had Ramon been about to tell her, she wondered. And what had he been about to do?

  ‘I have only just checked back into the hotel. I was away for a few days, on business.’ He came up to her and kissed her lightly on both cheeks. ‘Sorry. I am interrupting, I think?’

  Eva could imagine how it had seemed. ‘Not at all,’ she said politely. ‘This is Ramon. Ramon, Klaus, we met in Yangon.’

  The two men shook hands. Klaus’s non-committal smile seemed friendly enough but Eva sensed Ramon’s wariness. ‘Yangon?’ he echoed.

  ‘We met in a café.’ Klaus chuckled. ‘And then I dragged Eva off to see the Shwedagon and to dinner.’ He made it sound, she thought, like some sort of willing abduction. ‘I wondered what had happened to you.’ She saw him take in the longyi, the Burmese slippers, the jasmine in her hair. ‘I see you have settled in, for sure.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So what have you been doing since we last met?’

  She wouldn’t know where to start. ‘I went to Pyin Oo Lwin,’ she said, ‘and met Ramon and his family.’

  ‘And have you purchased many wonderful antiques?’

  Eva wished he hadn’t put it quite like that. ‘I’ve seen some interesting artefacts, yes,’ she said.

  ‘Good. And I have the name of that contact I mentioned.’

  ‘You will excuse me?’ Ramon cut in. ‘I will leave the two of you to talk.’

  ‘Oh, but …’ Eva realised she didn’t want him to leave. Not now, not like this.

  ‘No, no.’ Klaus gave a playful little bow which seemed to irritate Ramon still further. ‘It is I who interrupts your evening. We could meet tomorrow morning, Eva, if that is convenient? We can talk then.’

  ‘Of course. Let’s have coffee in the hotel bar. Will 10 a.m. suit you?’

  ‘Perfect.’ And Klaus gave a salute of farewell as he strolled away.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ But Eva realised as she looked at Ramon’s face that the moment was gone. Could he possibly be jealous, she wondered.

  Ramon frowned. ‘I recognise that man,’ he said.

  ‘Klaus? Where from?’

  ‘I am not sure.’ Ramon strode to the swing door and opened it for her. ‘And now, Eva, I must say goodnight.’ He took a card from his jacket pocket. ‘The address of our factory,’ he said. ‘For tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Eva wondered why she felt disappointed. Why did she feel she was on the brink of something, standing on a kind of dizzy edge and that the something kept being snatched away from her? From the hotel foyer, Eva watched him drive away with mixed feelings. She was drawn to him, yes, but she wouldn’t allow herself to get emotionally involved. There was absolutely no point. And she was glad she was meeting Klaus tomorrow. Another contact would be useful from the Emporium’s point of view. And she’d had another idea about how to retrieve the stolen chinthe. This would give her an excellent chance to put her plan into action.

  CHAPTER 30

  Rosemary took a deep breath. ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering.’ Was he up to talking about it? Would he even remember? He was usually at his sharpest in the mornings, but …

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘Why did you tell Eva all those years ago that she could come and live with you?’

  ‘When, Rosie?’ There was the confusion again, the vulnerability that stopped her from being angry with him. But there were things she had to talk about, things she had to find out before it was too late.

  ‘When I was planning to go to Copenhagen with Alec.’ She willed him to understand. ‘She was only sixteen. Why didn’t you talk to me about it first?’

  ‘Ah.’ His gaze rested on her face for a moment as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was. Then it drifted towards the window and the hydrangea bush outside – still flowering, though the blooms were faded and edged with brown.

  Rosemary waited. She should be patient with him. Give him time. Nick used to make Christmas wreaths from the hydrangeas, the ivy and the holly in her parents’ garden. He was good at that kind of thing. Their Christmas tree at home had never been decorated with neat silvery trinkets like Rosemary’s mother’s tree. It had cones Nick had spray-painted with Eva, stained glass lanterns and angels from the workshop, Eva’s own cotton-wool bearded Father Christmas with the lopsided grin. Soon it would be Christmas again, she thought. And what then?

  ‘She seemed so sad,’ her father said, just when Rosemary had thought he wasn’t going to reply at all. ‘She really didn’t want to go.’

  Of course she didn’t. But that wasn’t the point. Abruptly, Rosemary got to her feet, went to stand by the window. Her arms were tightly folded as if she could squeeze it all inside. Some hope, she thought. She
tried to relax. It was raining, huge drops splashing on to the path and the bushes, smattering the window pane. ‘Children never want to leave their friends,’ she said. She unfolded her arms, ran her fingers around the gold bangle on her wrist that Alec had bought her. ‘But they get used to it, that’s the point.’ She turned around. ‘She would have got used to it.’

  Her father blinked up at her.

  Yes, and perhaps you should have said this to him at the time, thought Rosemary. How could she be saying it to him now? Look at him. He didn’t deserve it, it wasn’t fair.

  ‘I felt sorry for her,’ he said. He frowned. ‘I should have spoken to you first, Rosie, but—’

  ‘Sorry for yourself too, I should think.’ There, that was it, out in the open. After all these years. And if he dared to say: I’d just lost your mother, she’d … Well, she wasn’t sure what she’d do.

  But he didn’t. ‘Perhaps you’re right, love,’ he said. ‘I hated the thought of you both going. My girls.’

  His girls. Now that he’d admitted it, Rosemary wasn’t sure what there was left to say. He’d hated the thought of them both going. That was a bit different.

  ‘She was crying.’ His eyes slipped into that faraway look that she had begun to recognise. ‘She begged me. I said we’d have to talk to you first, but …’

  ‘You didn’t think I should have gone,’ she said. Outside, the wind was blowing through the trees. She could hear its soft whistle.

  ‘You had to do what you thought was right,’ he murmured.

  ‘But did you think it was right, Dad?’ Even to herself she sounded like a dog with a bone. ‘Did you think it was right?’ She came back to the bed and sat down beside him. He was her father. She supposed she was looking for some sort of absolution.

  ‘Aren’t you happy, love?’ he asked. He took her hand in his dry and papery grasp. Squeezed.

  Rosemary looked down. She was as happy as she’d ever expected to be. But she wasn’t sure that it was enough. She wondered if Alec thought it was enough. ‘I wanted a new life,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know. I understand that. You went through so much, Rosie. You had to be strong.’

  She stared at him. He seemed so … together, all of a sudden, so wise. ‘I wasn’t strong.’

  ‘But you were.’ And his voice held all the reassurance that her father’s voice had ever held. ‘You kept it together for Eva.’ He sighed. ‘No one could have asked for more.’

  Except Alec, thought Rosemary. Except Alec and Eva and even Rosemary herself.

  She patted his hand. She could see him tiring. And suddenly, everything that had happened back then, the fact that he’d offered to look after his granddaughter when she’d needed it, as if he hadn’t already done so much, took on a different dimension. He had done it because Eva felt sad. He had done it to help them, because Eva had needed him to.

  Rosemary slipped out of the room to let him sleep. She thought of how he had been there for them both after Nick’s death, how he had pushed her into carrying on. She hadn’t seen it that way, not back then. But of course, he had done it out of love.

  *

  She phoned Alec after work, brought him up to speed on what was happening with her father. And, all the time, another part of her was listening to what she said, as if watching from the living room ceiling. They were so careful with one another, so polite. Neither of them mentioned Seattle. It almost made the watching Rosemary laugh.

  ‘Is what we have enough, Alec?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Is what we have enough? For you? For us?’ That’s what she had been thinking. So why not break the habit of the last thirty years and say it?

  ‘Not always,’ he said. She heard his breathing, calm, considered. ‘I thought it would be, but it’s not.’

  And Rosemary remembered what she’d said to him when he’d asked her to marry him: ‘I don’t know if I can …’

  ‘Marry me?’ he’d asked.

  ‘No. I don’t know if I can give you what you want.’ I don’t know if I can give you a hundred per cent, she had meant. I don’t know if I can ever stop grieving, stop thinking about the first man I married. I don’t know if I can love you in the way you deserve to be loved.

  And Alec had said, ‘You don’t need to.’

  ‘What about you?’ Alec said now, as if they were having a conversation about the weather. ‘Is it enough for you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Seattle lurked like a shadow on the wall behind her.

  ‘Then perhaps it’s a good thing to have this time apart, Rosemary,’ he said more gently.

  ‘Yes.’ Because she was trying, wasn’t she, to let loose this constriction around her heart.

  CHAPTER 31

  This morning, through the hotel, Eva had booked her river boat tickets for Bagan. Her departure was scheduled for four days’ time. It would be hard to leave, but she had more items to see for the Emporium and she was looking forward to visiting the famous temples of Bagan too. This would give her three full days there before she flew back to Yangon. She waited for Klaus in the hotel café. It was air-conditioned and slick, all black and chrome, a total contrast to the dusty streets of Mandalay.

  Klaus arrived promptly at 10 a.m. He was dressed casually today in a blue short-sleeved cotton shirt and beige shorts and was carrying the same leather bag that she’d seen him with when they first met. His blond hairline was glistening with sweat. He must have been out already and Eva knew that, even this early, it was thirty degrees outside.

  She greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks and waved at the seat opposite. ‘Sit down. It’s good to see you.’

  ‘And you.’

  They ordered coffee and chatted easily about the sights of Mandalay until it arrived, strong and sweetened with condensed milk, as was the custom. He caught her eye and they both chuckled.

  ‘Here is the name of the contact I mentioned.’ Klaus placed a business card on the table between them. ‘I think he is a reputable trader. He may have some things that will interest you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Eva glanced at the card and slipped it into her bag.

  ‘And now.’ He steepled his hands together and regarded her with a serious expression. ‘May I ask you something a little personal, Eva?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Are you involved with the man I saw you with last night?’

  That surprised her. ‘Romantically, do you mean? No, I’m not.’ Although she wasn’t sure she liked the question. She couldn’t help noticing the sweat still on Klaus’s brow from the heat outside, the damp blond hair pressing against his forehead. She felt like telling him it was none of his business, but perhaps he only had her best interests at heart. She took another sip of her coffee. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘And you met in Pyin Oo Lwin?’ His blue gaze searched hers.

  It seemed an honest gaze. Eva hesitated. But she wouldn’t tell him the story of the chinthe. She remembered what had happened at the Shwedagon, her feeling that Klaus might be hiding something. She liked him, but she wasn’t ready to confide in him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My grandfather knew his family when he was out here working in the timber industry before the war.’

  ‘I see.’ Klaus stroked his chin, which was clean-shaven and smooth. He seemed to relax slightly. ‘But you do not know him well,’ he pressed.

  ‘Not really.’

  He nodded and stirred his coffee. He seemed pensive, not quite the Klaus she had met back in Yangon.

  Eva looked at the hand holding the spoon. The back of it was covered with a blond down of hair. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘It was just that you looked … close,’ he said. ‘And I was a little concerned.’

  Close? It was, she thought, rather more complicated than that. And why should he be concerned? ‘Ramon’s family have a teak furniture business,’ she said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. ‘He runs the company but he’s still very hands-on from what I can gather.’ A master craftsman wa
s always a master craftsman; it was his life.

  ‘Yes, I know his company.’ Klaus frowned.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. Look, Eva.’ He took a swig of his coffee. ‘Please forgive me for interfering. And I realise that we have only recently met. But I think you should know …’

  ‘Yes?’ She waited.

  ‘I do not fully trust him.’ He sat back in his chair.

  Eva felt a cold and prickly sensation on the back of her neck. ‘For what reason?’ she asked.

  ‘He has dealings with a disreputable company,’ he said. ‘In what capacity I do not yet know. But I am certain that their business is not a legal one.’

  ‘And I’m certain that you’re mistaken.’ Eva finished her coffee and put her napkin to her lips. ‘Ramon’s company is independent. And totally above board.’

  Klaus raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe not as independent and above board as you believe.’

  Eva shrugged. Perhaps Ramon had decided to join forces with someone in an effort to get the company out of trouble. How would she know? And, come to think of it, how on earth did Klaus know his business dealings? ‘What does it have to do with you, Klaus? If you don’t mind me asking?’

  He raised both hands in mock defence. ‘I have an interest in the company he is working with, that is all,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this Ramon is an innocent in—’

  ‘What company?’ Eva was getting a bad feeling about this.

  ‘Li’s Furniture and Antique Company,’ he said. He leaned back once more. ‘But you will keep that to yourself, I hope.’

  Eva felt that hollow feeling of dread, right in the pit of her belly. ‘That’s impossible.’ She shook her head. And yet somewhere inside she was also conscious of a fleeting sense of inevitability. It was almost as if she’d known what he was about to say. Li’s seemed to be everywhere, lurking at the bottom of every ocean.

  ‘Nevertheless, it is the case,’ Klaus said. ‘I am sorry if that is a disappointment to you.’

  Again, Eva shook her head. She thought of the dark expression on Ramon’s face when he had seen that boat at the port. It made no sense. No sense at all.