In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  Both Ulrichs looked at me coldly. ‘Before you go, do put a compress on that eye,’ Irma said sharply. ‘Tell the amah to wrap some ice in a piece of towel, and press it to your eye. We don’t want you looking as if you’ve been in a catfight, do we?’

  I straightened my back. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. I shot a glance at Captain Ulrich. ‘I just banged it on the edge of my door in the dark this morning. It will soon be better.’

  It was still cool in the leafy front garden, made cooler by the tukan-ayer who was splashing water into the deep drains around the house to clear them of leaves and dust. I strolled up the short drive to Argyll Street, then turned right and started walking aimlessly towards the town. It was a busy Saturday morning, with rickshaws and cars passing in a steady stream.

  The house next to the Ulrichs’ was a ‘chummery’, bachelor quarters for a group of young Englishmen employed by one of the rubber companies. A Singer Tourer and a battered Baby Austin with its hood down stood in the driveway, surrounded by a group of young men clearly preparing for a picnic at the beach. They had the short haircuts favoured by the rugger crowd, and the laughter that hung in the air was frank and unambiguous. It made me feel better immediately and I stopped within earshot, screened by the heavy ferns at the front gate. I had come to loathe the sly maliciousness at home, and I wanted to bask, even for a moment, in the cheerful good humour of the moment.

  ‘Get your carcass out here, Bob!’ someone shouted towards the house. ‘If we don’t get a wriggle on the girls will give us up for dead and cut over to the Swimming Club! And tell Cook to hurry up with the hamper!’

  I could see it in my mind’s eye. Young men and pretty young girls at one of Penang’s beautiful North Coast beaches. A hamper full of good food – curry puffs, triangular sandwiches filled with anchovy paste, scones wrapped in linen, and screw-top pots of jam and cream. Cold Fraser & Neave lemonade and ice-cream soda, perhaps even some of the new American Coca-Cola. I could picture myself there in the sunshine, splashing at the edge of the sea, screaming in mock panic as somebody chased me into deeper water. Or perhaps just lying under the coconut palms, staring up into the blue vault of the sky, talking and laughing. Free of worry, free of fear . . .

  ‘Boo!’ My daydream burst as a grinning face confronted me through the ferns. One of the young men had spotted me behind the fronds and crept up on me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, turning pink with embarrassment. What an ass I must seem! I backed away hurriedly, stepping into the busy street behind me.

  ‘No need to apologise!’ the young man grinned. ‘Anyone who looks as pretty as you do is entitled to lurk outside our front gate any time they like. Whoa there!’ and an arm pulled me out of the way of a rickshaw and back onto the safety of the pavement.

  I turned even pinker but did not turn and run as I would have yesterday. Something had indeed happened to me since my dream. Denis had made me see myself quite differently: not as a gangling, frightened girl but as a poised young woman. I didn’t call him Denis then, of course, as I didn’t know his name. In those days when I wanted to think of the man in my dream I simply conjured up his face, the timbre of his voice, the level way he looked at me. He did not need to have a name.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, standing as tall as I could manage and with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘But I wasn’t lurking. I’d just stopped to rest a moment in the shade.’

  The young man bobbed his head in a half bow, acknowledging that he no longer had me at a disadvantage, then hesitated and cleared his throat. ‘Look, I do sort of know you. You live next door, don’t you? Would you think it an awful cheek if I asked you to come with us on our picnic?’

  I would have given my right hand to accept the invitation but of course I couldn’t. Things just didn’t happen that way in Penang in the 1930s. We hadn’t been introduced and I was from the wrong social level anyway. So I shook my head with a smile. ‘I’d love to accept, but you know how it is. Things have been arranged for today.’

  ‘Of course. I asked just in case. But perhaps some other time?’ He had carrot-coloured hair and freckles, and his eyes pleaded with mine.

  ‘Of course. Some other time.’

  I turned on my heel and walked on down Argyll Street, my head held high and my feet hardly touching the ground. I felt like a film star, a princess. Denis had worked some magic for me that had already transformed my life, and I began to love him for it.

  I wanted a talisman to remind me of Denis’s visit, something small and symbolic that I could keep with me always. The obvious place to look would be the Chinese curio shops, where all sorts of things could be found and where a Straits dollar went a long way. At first, nothing I saw seemed appropriate. The man who had visited me had been dressed in quiet good taste, and I felt that something modest and understated would be appropriate. But Chinese taste ran to the flamboyant: bright red embroidered cushions, vividly coloured armlets, rings and pendants, little dolls in sequined cheongsams. I sighed in exasperation.

  And then I found it, on a back shelf of Teng’s Chinese Magic Curio Shop in Rope Walk. A tiny tiger carved in ivory and mounted on a black onyx base. It was small enough to keep in my purse and its symbolism was perfect: a tiger for courage, to make me remember never to be afraid.

  I have kept it with me for over sixty years, and it rests now on my dressing table, guarding a little array of photographs of those I love in their tiny silver frames.

  Lunch was a pleasant meal as both the Ulrichs were out for the day, and I got on well with Ahmet, who cooked nasi goreng for me because he knew I liked it. After lunch I went up to my room and unwrapped my talisman, placing it carefully on the night table where Denis had lit the pressure lamp.

  I tried the chair but my skinny frame could not make it squeak the way Denis had. Sitting there, looking at my talisman, I half-closed my eyes and let the waves of relief and happiness wash over me. I was going to escape from the malicious, shallow and pretentious world around me, to the clean, real world that I had sometimes glimpsed. When I’d been with Robbie, my stepfather. Listening that morning to the young men at the chummery, planning a day of innocent good fun. In the books I read.

  I let myself think about Robbie, something I rarely allowed myself to do because it caused me so much pain. Ernest Roberts had married my mother just before Christmas in 1927, at the Anglican Cathedral in Kuala Lumpur. I had been seven or eight at the time and the event had changed my life. I remembered the three years Robbie had been my stepfather as magic years. He had treated me not as an encumbrance but as a treasured child, and shown me a very different world to the one I had lived in, and to which I had returned when he died of malaria at his gold mine deep in the jungles of Pahang.

  I felt the familiar prick of tears, and glanced at my talisman. Denis would have liked Robbie. They were both English gentlemen, and there had even been something in Denis’s face and demeanour that, now that I thought about it, reminded me of my stepfather.

  It began to rain, the heavy tropical downpour that came so often in mid-afternoon in Penang. I thought of the picnic party, perhaps laughing under one of the atap shelters a thoughtful Administration had erected near most popular swimming beaches, or staying out in the rain because it was a day at the beach and you expected to get wet anyway. I moved to the window and breathed in the cool fragrance of tropical rain on a lush garden. What a funny afternoon it was proving! I was happy despite the tears beneath my lids: a soft sadness, made bearable by the fact that I was no longer alone.

  I decided to finish a blue dress I was making for the dinner party, and carefully laid out the remaining pieces, each pinned to its paper pattern, on the polished timber floor. Within minutes I was absorbed in my task, pedalling away on the Singer sewing machine my mother had left with me, measuring and adjusting as I went, my mouth full of pins and my mind focused.

  I have always loved sewing, particularly making dresses to my own designs. My mother encouraged my interest, which is why she
had left the sewing machine with me. A kindness, but, like all things Mother did, a calculated kindness – she had also left a long list of things to sew for her and for Madam Tanya, her companion, a young woman only a few years older than I was.

  It was getting dark before I finished the dress and tried it on. Like all my things it was simply cut, with a demure, square neckline and long pleats falling to the floor. I twirled in front of my mirror, seeing the pleats fall open gracefully as I moved. It looked lovely.

  ‘Are you going to grace us with your company, Nona? Our guests are nearly here.’ Irma had stolen silently to my door, as she always did. But her tart comment had no effect on my mood. I ignored her, curtseyed towards the chair where Denis had sat, then swept past her into the upstairs gallery. Tonight, I promised myself, I would dedicate to the man who cherished me, and I would be beautiful and charming just for him.

  The dinner party was not held in the breakfast room where we normally ate but in the gloomy dining room, which always looked to me like a set for a Dracula movie. A huge mahogany sideboard occupied a full wall of the overcrowded room, and the dining table itself was a monstrous affair with elephantine legs and an awful mother-of-pearl design set into its centre. Copies of Flemish paintings in heavy gold-leaf frames covered most of the wall surfaces, and dark red velvet curtains covered the rest. To add to the general air of gloom the electric lights had not been turned on, the only illumination coming from three giant brass candelabras that sprouted from the table like grotesque growths. The chairs were terribly uncomfortable, with thin red cushions on solid mahogany bases and upright backs so ornately carved they were painful to rest against.

  ‘So very English!’ gushed Molly Tan as we settled ourselves around the table. Molly was Jack Van der Staaten’s secretary and had become his social companion since his wife’s death a few years before. She was an intelligent, no-nonsense person so I glanced at her sharply to see if she was being ironic, but her thin features were set in a bland smile.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Irma responded. ‘We do try to keep up the standards of Home.’ It struck me as an absurd statement. There was not a single drop of English blood in the room and yet so strong was the British Colonial ethic that everyone pretended that they were English outcasts stranded in a foreign land. The Ulrichs were Belgian, the Van der Staatens were a Dutch-Eurasian family from Junk Ceylon (now Phuket), Molly Tan was from a Straits Chinese family, and of course I was Russian. Of all of us only Molly had any real connection with England. As in many well-to-do Straits Chinese families, the Tans had a tradition of sending the brighter boys to Oxford or Cambridge, and Molly herself had spent a year at an English boarding school.

  The meal itself was depressingly English. Irma clapped rather theatrically and the boy came in with a huge tureen of bland Brown Windsor soup. A bad start, and I knew it was not going to get any better: the sickly smell of overcooked roast mutton had pervaded the house for the past hour. I wondered yet again why Penang ‘society’ insisted on second-rate English food when the local cuisine – particularly the spicy Nonya cooking that I loved – was available in abundance.

  ‘Off your food again, Nona?’ Irma asked, nodding pointedly at my barely touched soup bowl.

  ‘Oh no, Irma . . .’ I began, but then remembered my new resolve. ‘Actually, I’m not that keen on Brown Windsor. But it’s very nicely cooked.’

  Irma’s eyebrows had risen almost to her hairline. ‘How delightful of you to tell me that it’s nicely cooked!’ she said, her mouth twisting as if she were biting into a lemon. ‘So what sort of soup do you like, Nona? Borsch, I suppose. That awful stuff made from beetroot and sour cream.’

  A small, awkward silence was broken by Molly. ‘What lovely paintings you have on your wall, Irma,’ she said. ‘Are they originals?’ Now I knew she had her tongue in her cheek – Molly would know as well as I did that the painting were products of Ah Chong’s Art Emporium. Ah Chong had a production line, using students from the Penang School of Arts – even artistic school children – to mass-produce copies of the Old Masters. Emporium paintings were almost famous in the Far East, being so obviously bad that it was quite fashionable to have one or two in the house as talking points.

  ‘Actually, I think they are mainly by the Masters’ students,’ Irma said, mollified. Even Ronnie Van der Staaten rolled his eyes. I think he might have done piecework for Ah Chong in his time.

  Jack Van der Staaten was in a mellow mood, probably due to Molly’s deft social skills that smoothed over every rough moment and kept the atmosphere light and cheerful. He had some good stories to tell about Penang’s earliest days and he told them with vigour and style. His ancestors had come over from Junk Ceylon with Francis Light in the 1790s, and the stories he told us of those early days made my hair stand on end. Pirates, robbers and assassins figured in the tales, which he embellished with graphic dialogue and the occasional heavy slap on the table with an open palm.

  Captain Ulrich added one or two stories of his own, about his exploits during the Great War when he had been attached to a British regiment in Flanders as a tunnelling engineer. He was cool but impeccably polite towards me, and when the subject of my black eye came up, as it was bound to, he actually had the grace to look ashamed. Or it may have been merely a trick of the uncertain light: the guttering candles made us all look a bit odd at times.

  Once or twice Irma turned her malicious tongue on me, but each time Molly came to my rescue. I warmed towards this gracious lady, who smiled so nicely at me from behind her heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. It seemed so unfair that despite all her intelligence and charm, and her high status within the Straits Chinese community, she would never be accepted as a member of Colonial society because she was not European. The Swimming Club, the Golf Club, the Penang Club were all barred to her, and though she would be received at Government House it would only be on official occasions, as a representative of one of the lesser races of the Empire.

  Several bottles of South African red wine were opened, and not being accustomed to alcohol I was quite muzzy-headed by the time the soggy breadand-butter pudding came round. It was quite a pleasant feeling, as if I were floating gently above the table, and when Irma wound up the gramophone on the sideboard and played some popular English airs I felt so moved that tears threatened behind my eyelids. It was so unusual, this feeling of actually being accepted as an adult.

  I even smiled at the incongruity of listening to the latest London musichall songs while huge Malayan frogs croaked in the tropical garden outside and in the far distance sounded the faint clash and drumming of a Chinese band.

  Don’t misunderstand me – I was not anti-English. Far from it. I had grown up reading English books and all my heroes were English. Bulldog Drummond, Sanders of the River, Sir Percy Blakeney, Rudolf Rassendyle, Richard Hannay. During the three years my mother had been married to Robbie I had actually thought of myself as English. Robbie liked people to think I was his daughter, and he called me Norma in public, an Anglicised version of Nona. Initially only in public, but towards the end, when he was sick and I used to sit with him, he called me Norma even when there were only the two of us. At those times I convinced myself he was my real father, and we talked about going ‘home’ to England, and smelling new-mown grass as we walked together in Richmond Great Park on a Sunday morning.

  But Robbie had died and reality had re-imposed itself. I was not, after all, ‘dust who England bore, shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to know, her ways to roam’. I was a little Russian girl, an alien, trying to make my way in a world fashioned for the English.

  ‘Ronnie, you can waltz very well. Why don’t you ask Nona for a dance?’ I was saved from my maudlin thoughts by Irma’s clumsy interference, and I was almost grateful to her.

  ‘No. Thank you all the same, Ronnie,’ I said more forcefully than I had intended. Ronnie’s instant look of gratitude told me that there was no risk of heartbreak. He had been deeply involved in a conversation with his elder brother ab
out the recent Bodyline cricket tour of Australia, a subject that had set the minds and tongues of young men on fire throughout the Empire.

  ‘The boys prefer their cricket to women at the moment, I’m afraid, Irma,’ Jack said comfortably. ‘But give them a few more years and girls like Nona will have to run pretty fast to keep out of their clutches.’

  The boys and I blushed scarlet, and another awkward moment descended on the table. An awkwardness which Molly once again stepped into to dispel. ‘So you have at last found a buyer for Burnbrae?’ she said turning to me. ‘It could be a sign that the Depression may be lifting.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Burnbrae was a tea plantation up in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya that Robbie had once owned. It had been swallowed up by debts at his death, just as had ‘my’ gold mine. I called it ‘my’ gold mine because Robbie had left it to me in his will, a lovely and romantic gesture that had meant nothing as the mine had been worked out and was worthless.

  Irma turned greedy eyes on me. ‘What is this about Burnbrae, Nona? I had no idea your mother owned any property.’ She said it almost accusingly, as if mother had been cheating her in some way.

  ‘Burnbrae is not Julia’s,’ Molly said quietly. ‘It’s Nona’s.’

  I was astounded by this remark, and must have looked it, because Molly abruptly changed the subject. ‘So the youngsters won’t dance, eh?’ she said. ‘Does that mean that nobody is going to ask me? Am I to remain a wallflower all evening?’ And she turned such winsome eyes on Jack that he simply had to scrape back his heavy mahogany chair and lead her to the small parquet dancing space in front of the gramophone.

  I had only a short reprieve. As soon as Jack and Molly were away from the table Irma started in on me again. ‘And what is this about finding a buyer, Nona? Does this mean that you will be able to pay some of the arrears your mother has run up on your behalf? There is a considerable amount owing, and while I did not press you when I thought your scatterbrained mother was to pay, this does change everything.’