by Derek Beaven
‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘It would be my last chance.’
‘Your last chance at what?’
‘At being a father to you.’
That made her gasp, and she sipped her own Scotch, taking it neat, as he did. Its grainy sting helped with the tears that sprang suddenly to her eyes. ‘Don’t be bloody silly. You’ve always been that.’
‘Technically.’
‘But why?’ She dug at the lawn with the toe of her sandal like a child. ‘And why England, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Where else is there?’
‘Most of the globe, I should say. Shouldn’t you, Daddy? Most of the globe would be a darned sight safer, just at the moment. Hmm?’
When she was a girl, England had just meant boarding-school, and before that a place with a train journey inside it. At one end of that railway line was the country practice in Suffolk with her mother and father. At the other was London and her cousin Phyllis. Then she’d grown up; and there had been Vic. England would force her to open up all that heartache again. In order to protect herself she was desperate to stay, and yet – dare she admit it – she also ached to see him. In her heart she was all but ready to collude with her father’s wishes. The matter was beyond endurance. She half wished Robin Townely would write and take her mind off the subject of Vic Warren; for, since she’d held Phyllis’s letter in her hand, she’d hardly thought of anything else.
‘You’ve nothing to live on and most of the world’s turning nasty,’ Dr Pike said. ‘Haven’t you been reading the papers, Clarice?’
‘Nothing’s happened since Poland!’ Exasperation filled her tone.
‘Oh, nothing!’
She clicked her teeth. ‘You know what I mean.’
Once, after a party at Port Dickson, a convoy of Clarice’s friends had driven with her up into the villages. There she had seen her first shadow play. The performance had been done under the stars by means of a large stretched sheet. But the boozy young crowd she was with hadn’t understood the formalities. The language had been poetic, a far cry from the basic chat the English had to master for their servants.
She’d been mystified by the play, its lengthy preambles, and the hesitancy about committing to the action, but had grasped there was a reason. To the accompaniment of drumbeats and the clash of cymbals, the drama had lasted late into the night, by which time most of her party had fallen asleep. Even then the story had been only half told. It was the ancient epic of the Ramayana: of the lovers, and the forest; of the hermitage, the war, the wickedness of the abductor; and of the great bridge across which the avenger went forth upon the sea. It occurred to her that the new war might have the same self-indulgent pace. The thought chilled her.
She stooped now to poke at a web in the flower-bed. The cords were strung thickly under the great speared arch of a leaf, and the spider came running out into the sun. It stopped. She agitated the threads again. ‘I’m being a butterfly. Look. Come on, then. Can’t get me, can you?’ The spider raised one minutely furred leg, in suspicion. It failed to budge. ‘Can’t be bothered, after all.’ She straightened up. ‘Just like men.’
Her father’s laugh was brief and preoccupied. She plucked a thought. ‘Did you send Phyllis anything? Dear Phyllis and … Victor. And their brat. What was its name, I forget?’
‘Not pregnant, are you?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Daddy.’ He astonished her. ‘Just because I mention … How dare you!’
‘A girl without a mother. Someone has to ask. Once in a while.’ He was embarrassed amidst his red mottle and doctor’s manner.
‘If that’s what you mean by being a better father …’
‘Sorry. I don’t know how a woman would go about it. Doesn’t someone have to? Keep tabs, I mean?’
‘No, they damn well don’t. And I’m not – as far as I know.’
He coughed and adjusted his hat. ‘Jack. I sent him a suit of clothes.’
‘All right, then.’ She found herself putting her arms around her father’s neck, hugging him more fiercely than she could understand. Then she broke away. ‘All right, Daddy. It won’t be “over by Christmas”, as all the barroom experts have been predicting. It has that in common with last time. And all right, there’s an expeditionary force in France. But nothing’s going on. That’s why they call it “phoney”, Daddy. It isn’t happening.’
‘It’s happening to the Poles.’ He shamed her. ‘And something’s happening to the Finns, the Jews, the poor benighted Chinese.’
‘But it’s not happening to me. Is it? It isn’t happening to me.’
‘For God’s sake, Clarice!’
She bit her lip. ‘It’s just I don’t understand you. There’s always something going on in the world. Always something awful being done to someone. It’s not like you to come over like this. You’re not yourself. You always said, didn’t you, look after the next man and the world will get better. I thought that’s what you did, as a doctor. That’s how I imagined you, Daddy. I admired you. I thought we were safe here. I thought you were happy. Aren’t you?’
‘Happy enough.’ He looked sharply at her.
‘Well then. Why ruin it all because of some potty idea – about me? What’s making you like this?’ She felt Singapore slipping away, Malaya itself receding. Terrified – and piercingly glad – she seized on the next unkind remark that came to mind. ‘Not the Scotch, is it? You’re not going the way of all white men?’
Yet he seemed in such a pinch, and she was sorry. She caught the implication of something serious going on; sensed almost his impotence. Was he in love, she wondered? Had some affair at the tennis club gone awry?
‘What troubles me is that I’m probably too late. I’ve failed you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is where we live. You’re needed, Daddy. You can’t leave.’ She checked her emotions again, but knew he’d seen her.
‘You sound just as though you were six.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
This time he put his arm around her. ‘Look, darling. Take it on trust, will you? There’s nothing for it. I’ve got to take the risk now. If it all goes well and everything calms down … You know? If there’s a stand-off of some kind … Well, I can come back easily enough, can’t I?’
‘Can you? Can we?’
‘Just another leave, eh?’
‘If you say so.’ She stood quite still. ‘If you say so, Daddy.’
‘Tuan!’ Musa called to them from the veranda. Her father went to enquire. Then he came back, black bag in hand. A company employee had sent about a sick child.
‘Sorry,’ he said. She watched him stride up the garden and thought how he was growing old. ‘Probably shan’t be long,’ he called over his shoulder. Then he disappeared round the side of the bungalow to get the car started.
BUT HE WAS a long time. And, yes, I do hold matters too much in abeyance, lingering here in Malaya, in paradise, because of the payment that was demanded later that evening. It was a sacrifice in return for a fair wind, so to speak, and it was Selama who chose to make it. We try to avoid coming to the pain of such things; for if Vic and Phyllis were bitterly joined in England, Dr Pike was anchored to his spot by a supreme tenderness.
It had rained and was dark before he returned, and he brought with him the Malayan nurse, Selama Yakub, whom Clarice had met several times before. She watched from the veranda as her father helped the woman out of the car and past the puddles; then she went down in the glow of the lantern to greet them.
‘My assistant, Mrs Yakub,’ her father said. ‘Working on a case at the hospital. Of course, you know each other, don’t you.’
The nurse wore a neat, white uniform, but had exchanged her headgear for a scarf. She clutched it around her face as she entered, then threw it back. ‘How are you, Miss Clarice? So nice to see you again.’
‘Oh fine, thanks. Nice to see you.’
‘So kind of Dr Pike to invite me – after so long.’ Mrs Yakub dar
ted a piercing glance at him, then looked straight at Clarice. She seemed about to say more, but turned away instead.
Their meal of lamb curry was conventional, and the conversation strained. Selama Yakub sent the kuki away. She served as though she were the mistress of the house, but hardly touched her food. Clarice felt uncomfortable. The inkling of disturbance she’d felt earlier continued in the air. She hadn’t known such an atmosphere for years – in fact since her mother was alive. Selama’s lack of appetite did not help.
Clarice’s mother had used to excuse herself from table, saying she felt a little ill; and when she thought no one could see her out beyond the veranda, Mattie had a method of making herself sick, leaving most of her meal in the back of the flower-bed – where by morning, the younger Clarice had noted with interest, all evidence of distress had been eaten by less troubled creatures.
After dinner they sat, she and her father, in the study, playing old-fashioned dance tunes on his wind up gramophone. They were alone. Selama Yakub had claimed she wanted to dispense some of the doctor’s prescriptions; but when Clarice went to use her bathroom she bumped into the nurse bringing in a tray of cups from the veranda. And someone had obviously been tidying the sitting-room.
On her return Clarice said nothing about it. With the Aladdin lamps aglow in the study, the various insects constantly getting in to crash at the flame, the air fugged and prickly with cigar smoke, she thought neither of Selama nor her mother, but of Phyllis, because of the dance tunes. She saw more vividly that leggy girl in plimsolls who, out of her element on visits to the house at the end of the railway line, would cling to the gramophone and put on certain records again and again.
She had always hated her cousin. Older than she, Phyllis claimed to know everything, to have done everything. When they’d played together Phyllis had been unremittingly spiteful. Yet Phyllis had loved the cheap songs – because a gramophone, indeed music of any kind, represented more luxury than she could imagine.
Clarice broached the subject of her father’s fever again. Like his drinking, it was a touchy one. ‘Has it really been troubling you?’
‘Turning jaundiced, am I?’
‘Why are you so difficult?’
‘Clearly not wasting away.’ He slapped his stomach. ‘As you can see.’
‘All right, Daddy. Don’t take it out on me. You still enjoy work, don’t you?’ Ambrose and his Orchestra finished their quickstep. She got up, rewound the clockwork motor, changed the needle and set it back on the other side of the disk. A crackly tango emerged. Her father refreshed their glasses.
‘I do. Except that lately …’
‘You are needed, Daddy.’ Something was definitely up. She wanted to pre-empt it. ‘You’re needed … to make people better.’
‘How simple you make it sound.’
‘I’m not naïve. I’m not.’ Her fingers tapped the armrest of her chair.
He put out an awkward hand to touch them, smoothed her wrist and then drew back. ‘Self-sacrifice, Clary. Yours and mine. We think if we sacrifice ourselves we can have what we want. Eh? Or have I unwittingly sacrificed my own daughter?’
‘What?’ She threw back her slug of whisky.
There was a knock at the door. It was Mrs Yakub. ‘No need to hurry, Dr Pike. Paperwork to do,’ she added with a tense smile at Clarice as if to account for her continued presence. ‘Is it all right if I sit at the dining-room table? You don’t mind? None of those newspaper cuttings now, I see. In your honour, no doubt, Miss Clarice. He’s promised to run me to my home. My son’s house. So kind, Dr Pike. You don’t mind, do you? Perhaps I’d better look after this, however.’ She gave another knowing grimace at Clarice and darted in to pick up the whisky bottle from beside her father’s chair. Then she left, almost apologetically.
‘You are overdoing the booze.’
He grunted. ‘No more than usual. Not to excess, if that’s what you mean.’
‘If that’s the truth then why was she so keen to take it away? And what newspaper cuttings? Did she mean all that mess I saw before?’
‘Perhaps the bloody woman likes to boss people about. Perhaps she’s got it in for me. I don’t know. Bloody natives. Nothing feels right. Everything’s out, askew.’ His hand lifted suddenly, and sliced at the air, startling her. ‘This war … Everything that’s happening now seems to me so cleverly … planned, Clary. Down to the details. I don’t know what that means but it troubles me, a scientific man. It scares me rigid. There’s nothing to counter it with, no case notes, no precedent, nothing.’ The gramophone needle hissed round and round in the groove at the record’s end.
‘I simply don’t follow, Daddy. Do you go to the club? Do you speak to people? That woman, Mrs Yakub …’ She twitched her head in the direction of the dining-room. ‘Your assistant. Do you talk to her?’ Under her breath, she added, ‘What’s she doing here? What was she up to in the sitting-room? She’s been putting things away in the sideboards.’
He grunted. ‘Oh, Selama likes to keep me in order. Bored, I expect. Waiting for me to drive her home. Salt of the earth, though. Damned good nurse.’
‘Selama? Is she your …? Daddy?’ Clarice remembered another scene, of her parents by her piano. The Broadwood he’d shipped over for her had lasted only two months. From the moment of arrival its sound had become more oriental by the hour. Rust and mould had attacked it with dullness, and then excrescence. The hammers warped and the felts rotted. Whole octaves of its keyboard refused to play at all, while small lizards made homes in the soundbox. She recalled there’d been an argument.
‘Good Lord, no. I’m past all that. Past all that sort of nonsense. Just good friends, I can assure you.’
‘Does she often come here, then? And keep an eye on your drinking? And take a proprietary interest in your housekeeping? Do you talk to her?’
‘Not much. My grasp of Malay isn’t up to the subtleties of things I can’t even put into English. And her grasp of English …’
‘So there is something the matter!’
‘Nothing special, I assure you. Nothing special.’ But the sigh appeared only partially to discharge his feeling. She watched his lip quiver. She watched, too, as he got up and went to his desk. He took up a piece of paper and handed it to her. It was a photograph, an Associated Press cutting of the Emperor of Japan. It showed a young gentleman in a perfect Western suit and high collar posed next to Lloyd George outside a country house. And I cannot but allow my great-uncle to make his fatal speech, though the minutes were slipping away.
‘Britain and Japan, Clarice. People say they’re wily Orientals, inscrutable yeller fellers. People at the club explain the war in China as the Asiatic mind. They say we’re safe, it’ll never touch us. As though we’re almost a different … species. As though they hardly see us, or see us as gods. Think about this, child.’ He crossed the floor and turned abruptly to face her as he reached the jardinière. The potted palm on its mahogany stand fountained up next to him, and loomed over his balding head. He looked like some famous old anatomist discussing the organs.
‘Two insulated, legendary pasts,’ he was saying. ‘Two similar knightly traditions; of kingship, honour and reticence, of the obsession with class distinctions and “the decent thing”. Think, child. Isn’t Japan an extraordinary mirror, as though the map of the world could be folded on to itself? The Japanese aren’t like the British; no. But very like them. That small off-continental cluster’s need for industrial strength … And sea power – Nelson is as sacred in Yokohama as he is in Portsmouth. Did you know that? Think. Each of us has the same absolute conviction of racial superiority. What then? Is there truly a new order in the universe? Is there something bloodstained and Darwinian? Or have we just been mistaken about the old?’
Clarice stared at him. Now he was wry, disturbing; his delivery was enigmatic. She couldn’t follow him.
He strode back to the far side of his desk, and swung round again to rest his hand on the narrow top where a lamp stood, smoking slightl
y from its glass. ‘Japan wants the British out of the East. She hates us. The only reason British nationals were relatively safe in Shanghai was through the difficulty of murdering them. If Japan is to strike for dominance she’ll need oil, rubber and tin.’ He gestured at the walls of the bungalow. ‘If they come …’
She wondered if he wanted Mrs Yakub to hear. Was he trying to tell her something? ‘Robin says it’ll never happen.’ She bit her lip. ‘As for the new order. There’s something in it, isn’t there? I thought it had been proved scientifically. Hasn’t it?’
‘People become ill,’ he said, ‘when they’re told things that aren’t true. The power of words, of suggestion – it’s up to us to use it … lovingly. The more I practise, the more I believe that medicine is a kind of charm. Influenza! My mother – your granny – died of it. They all did. It means influence – an evil spell. Clinically, they died of magic. How primitive. It puts the doctor on the side of the angels, Clary.’ He smiled, and she was relieved. ‘Take my fever? Malaria means wicked air, you know. I confess to you I have such a feeling in my bones. These words, these names. You need to pay close attention. You should question what your Robin says.’
‘He’s not my Robin any more,’ she blurted.
‘Then we’re in the same boat, darling.’
‘I see,’ she said, although she didn’t.
‘Except I have made up my mind.’ Then he took a brown envelope from under the stand of a heavy brass microscope. ‘I bought these. They came this morning in the post. We’ve simply got to get away.’
From the brown envelope he took out a slip of paper and showed it to her. It confirmed the booking of two cabins on the Dutch liner Piet Hein from Penang to Marseilles. The tropical night rasp seemed to force a way in through the blinds.
